Timed Execution

How can I get a php script to run every hour or every day? I am using Linux 7.1

Can I even get a php script to run without calling it thro apache? I have no clue as you can probably see :/

Cron would seem to be the obvious way, but i don't know anythign about PHP

You can run php scripts without apache. You can just run the script at the shell prompt. You may want to run it with the '-q' option to remove the html header tags.

# php -q script.php

The below script to print "hello world" will look different depending on whether or not you use this option.

PHP Code:

<? 
print "Hello World! \n" 
?>

This script without the '-q' option would produce the following output:

================================

X-Powered-By: PHP/4.0.5
Content-type: text/html

Hello World!

================================

While, using the '-q' option would only produce this:

================================

Hello World!

================================

Just a note - Sykkn's post assumes you have installed PHP as a stand alone CGI interpretter (sp?)... I've never seen this done, so its probably not the case with your setup. Also, unless this is the case then you won't be able to call the PHP script from cron directly - you'd need to use something like mget or Pavuk to run regularly and access the URL to get the script executed.

It sounds to me like you want a Perl script instead...

cheers

Jamie...

how could I get a cgi script run thro cron?

You would just need to call it like any other program in cron... its effectively just a shell script... If you want to pass parameters to it then you may want to put those parameters in a text file and call the script with something like myCGIScript.cgi < myTextFile that way your parameters will be passed to the script on STDIN - the same way the HTTP 'get' method goes about it.

HTH

Jamie...