cron jobs and php

[lakrasia]

Hi,

I have a php page to process mysql records which works fine. Except when I run it as a cron job, using 'wget' - the main part doesn't work - it does run, as I've written it to send me an e-mail at the end, which it does.

I'm puzzled. It requires no interaction, needless to say, so it's not falling over because I haven't filled in a form.

I don't really want to show the code here, but I wondered if there's anything in general that cron jobs can't handle please?

Cheers
Linda

[pricethat]

awww goo on, lets have a laugh at it

You would be better off showing the code, its like a guessing game otherwise. I know people can be protective of their code like its some majic secret but i am sure its nothing that hasnt either been done before or done better (as in works with cron tasks).

[OLBG]

I think there is a difference on how a page runs when under a cron than when run by a browser. Can affect file paths etc - does your script have any includes?

[Swiss]

Doesn't wget actually download the taget file instead of executing it? Whats the actual crontab command that you are using?

[lakrasia]

Hi,

Thanks - I removed the include, but it didn't help.

I spent ages doing tests and narrowed it down to a single line of code.

[php]$datafeedurl="http://products.affiliatewindow.com/csvproductoutput.php?mid=".$merchantid."&user=1234 5&password=password&nozip=1";
PHP]

I'm sending two variables to the script. One definitely works, but somewhere $merchantid is getting lost.

Very strange that it works manually, but not as a cron job and I really need to figure this out, if anyone knows why.

Cheers
Linda

[Rich]

There should be no difference between a wget request and a manual one to the same url, but as it sounds like you have variables in the request it could be those that are confising things, particually if there are more than one.

If you're currently trying to run: -
wget http://www.yoursite.com/script.php?s...6&merchantid=5

then you'll want to change it to: -
wget "http://www.yoursite.com/script.php?something=6&merchantid=5"

otherwise the & will get treated as the end of the command.

That doesn't really explain why you can email $merchantid to yourself but that it isn't getting included in the datafeedurl.

[lakrasia]

Thanks so much Rich.

Firstly, I think I got muddled about the e-mail getting the variable - I've been running cron jobs all day, interspersed with manual ones to fix the file after. Half the time the cron jobs don't run, so it's been a very confusing task.

BTW - ' works, " wipes out the job completely.

Thanks very much - really pleased to finally get it running.

Cheers
Linda

[marcg]

Originally Posted by lakrasia I have a php page to process mysql records which works fine. Except when I run it as a cron job, using 'wget' - the main part doesn't work - it does run, as I've written it to send me an e-mail at the end, which it does.

Why are you running wget through cron are you running the request on a remote machine?

Couldn't you just setup a cron job on the system the script is running on to execute it using the command line php interpreter?

/usr/bin/php /path/to/scriptname.php > output.txt

??

It sounds to me like your script requires some parameters passed to it in the querystring and these are not being sent by the wget command. you might need to look at the docs for wget, but it likes some qs chars to be escaped.

[lakrasia]

Thanks Marc,

Rich solved the problem for me in his posting before I sent my posting thanking him. Maybe I didn't make it clear that it worked - it just needed the " changed to '.

Cheers
Linda