How do you make a program check the time and date on its own and perform scheduled tasks?

For example, I want to load a PHP program onto my server that sends a text file to my Email once a day at 4:15pm. How can I make a program do this?

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An overworked Web Developer who\'s expected to know everything yet given time to study nothing.

You can schedule a task. On linux/unix, this generally involves using "cron". On windows, you'll use "Scheduled Tasks".

The PHP script will send the file to your email address.
The task scheduler will run your PHP script once a day at 4:15pm.

You should have PHP installed as a command-line interpreter for this to work. On windows, php.exe comes with the standard .zip download of PHP. On linux, the php executable interpreter is compiled whenever you compile PHP.

You can either put this executable in your system path, or just explicitly call it out.


For example, on my Windows machine, I'd create a scheduled task to run:

C:\php\cli\php.exe -q p:\path\to\my\phpfile.php



Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/