I'm going to be experimenting with using cron jobs for a project in
the near future, and was wondering what experiences people have with
using PHP for cron jobs?

I guess I'm asking if there are any complete "gotcha's" that people
have been caught out with, or is it all pretty standard stuff ?

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Use Perl or C for that. But be careful: as a CRON-CGI don't start using
a browser, the related path for files are different! To test correctly
your CRON-CGI, launch it using a telnet tool.

PL Lamballais

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I use php for lot of my cron jobs...
I used to call php from shell as cgi, but lately I call php scripts from
cron by wget, and this way it works fine with apache module php, and I don't
have to have php installed as cgi.

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Thanks - that sounds really encouraging.

The main thing we are thinking about (have yet to test), is use of
MySQL in the cron job to make decisions - and while we know that Perl
is just as happy talking to MySQL, it might be nice (in this case) to
use PHP across the board - it's part of a system involving a thin
client done in PHP...

http://www.kafooey.com (Home Page)
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On Fri, 08 Nov 2002 16:04:28 +0100, Pierre-Louis LAMBALLAIS

I understand completely what you are saying, and normally we would be
using Perl or C, but we have a thin client in this project that is
using PHP and MySQL extensively - so it would make sense to use PHP
for the cron jobs that are going to be talking to the MySQL databases.

We would love to keep things simple if we can :)

http://www.kafooey.com (Home Page)
http://www.pluggedout.com (Development Work)
http://www.thoughtcafe.co.uk (Pet Project)

I have a cron running for a kind of "on this day" system. The script
connects to a MySQL db, runs a query and sends out an e-mail to each person
on the list.

I'm far from a UNIX bod, and I managed it without any problems. I did a fair
bit of experimenting with running it from the command line, but, as before
no real problems.

--
David.

While it's not as efficient as C, I find it great for rapid and easy
development and so I use PHP for several cron jobs.  Some gotchas from
my perspective:

1. Insure that you have some way of checking to see that only one
instance of your  application is running at a time if it's going to
operate on a common directory or file and may take longer than
expected.

2. If you call the apache-module using wget, insure that your job
outputs some data to the "screen" as it's executing - just use
-O/dev/null for the wget job.  I haven't recently checked but wget
would time out regardless of any flags passed to it if no data was
forthcoming.

3. Depending on the requirements of the job, you may want to build
some "sleeps" into your loops.  Executing a large PHP job on a small
system can drag it into swapping.  For example I have a large job that
graphically processes and sends out about 50 emails of images every
morning from a small machine.  It's otherwise unuseable during that
time.

Billy

PHP and MySQL are great friends ;-)) I (and I'm not alone) use MySQL in
pretty much every larger script/site I write in PHP. Take a look at the
MySQL chapter of the manual.

KAH

I have used PHP scripts with cron a lot.  Since I am using a slightly
outdated PHP version that doesn't support the command-line mode, I
usually write a shell script to be put into cron.* which looks like
this:

cd /tmp
wget http://localhost/path/myscript.php
rm myscript.* -f  

Cheers,
NC

In this case you might want to try
wget <url> --quiet -O - > /dev/null

Then you won't have to delete some file after running wget :)

/Micke

Or a >slightly< better version of the above:

wget <url> --quiet -O /dev/null

(outputs right to /dev/null instead of to stdout-redirected-to-/dev/null)