Cron job for a php-file

nineball9 · October 21st, 2003, 02:00 AM

I have searched, but not yet found a way to run a php-file in my crontab. PHP is compiled with Apache on a FreeBsd machine.

If you can tell me how to run a php-file from my command prompt, that's fine too.

Daniel Walker · October 21st, 2003, 07:30 AM

To run PHP at the tcsh prompt, you must have the CLI version of PHP (4.3.0 onwards). You can determine this by typing "php -v" - e.g., I get:

moon# php -v
PHP 4.3.1 (cli) (built: May 28 2003 01:33:36)
Copyright (c) 1997-2002 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v1.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2002 Zend Technologies

Then just run your script. The syntax is thus:

moon# php my_script.php

Works for me. FYI, I'm on a Toshiba Satellite laptop running FreeBSD 5.1 Release.

HTH
Dan
P.S. Full instructions can be had at the usual source ;)
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php

nikolai · October 21st, 2003, 04:58 PM

If you don't have the authority to install PHP's commandline interpreter, and are stuck with it installed as an apache module, then put your script somewhere it can be accessed via the web, and use wget or curl to fetch that web page. Apache will run your PHP script to service the HTTP request.

Also, PHP has a "-q" option for running things on the commandline that supress the default HTTP header output. This is usually just "Content-Type: text/html" and "X-Powered-By: PHP/<version>".

Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/