using CRON

Hi guys,

I was told that i can automate my PHP site using CRON. I read some of the reference book and it seems like i need access crontab from shell and run certain command. The problem is i am not administrator of the server. Hence i dun think i can key in such command to try. Is there any ways i can perform the tasks that can be done by using CRON ? Can i use PHP code to perform such tasks ?

P.s: i want to do automated tasks like remove users that didn't login for 2 weeks from the database, send enews to clients in the mailing list once a month and etc by using CRON.

Please advise.

If you don't have access to cron, the only thing I know of for you to do is to add code to your login or some other frequently-used script that, when needed, executes and performs these cleanup tasks. So, for example, you might have a code block that checks the date against a stored date and, if it's been two weeks since the last clean-up, runs a bunch of clean-up code. Else it'll just pass over the test and add no significant overhead to the script. This'd work only if you have a fair amount of usage (at least one session a day would do the trick, and, arguably, if you're not having a higher volume of traffic than that, clean-up isn't necessarily an issue anyway).

I suggest you create a batch script which performs the proper mysql query and have it run from your home computer under at (windows task scheduler).

This is how I backup over 20 mysql databases unattended.

When shelled in... try crontab -e. You should be able to set crontabs at the non-root level.

sunphp