I'm not a linux guru and I'm having problems figuring out why my cron scripts won't work from the cron scheduler in cpanel even if they work when you click on them.

for instance I have a script called updates.php that needs to run every night at 1am so I schedule a cron
0 1 * * * * php updates.php

the script process but the path to the db either doesn't open or the password fails if it does open depending on the various attempts I have tried to make this work.

I use cpanel to schedule my cron and I'm running linux redhat enterprise 10 and basically I'm a php/mysql guru who tries to stay away from being a server admin. Is there some code that should be included at the top of my script to make this work?

here is one of the many errors I have gotten:
<b>Warning</b>: main(/includes/admin_nodisplay.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in <b>/home/xxxxxxx/public_html/upd/test_cron.php</b> on line <b>15</b><br /> <br />
<b>Warning</b>: main(): Failed opening '/includes/admin_nodisplay.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in <b>/home/xxxxxxx/public_html/upd/test_cron.php</b> on line <b>15</b><br /> hello world<br />

this is the include command that fails in cron but works from any directory at any level on the site when I use it normally:
include ("{$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']}/includes/admin_nodisplay.php");

when I switch to absolute paths I get failed password issues when connecting to local host.

Hi

When running PHP scripts as a command like you do, you don't always get the same result as running it on the web-server. I dont know anything about RedHat enterprise, but on e.g. Debian you have two different php.ini files - one for the web-server and one for CLI (command line interface). Also it's easy to mess up things like who is the running user and the environment variables.

So instead you can just make a script somewhere in the web-space, test it, and when it works, add a "wget http://localhost/..." in the cron.

If you dont want anyone to accidentally access your script, you can just check $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] and stop if not your own server.

Best regards,
Guttorm.