Cron jobs

[xan]

Getting errors on cron.

cron.php is in my public_html dir.

Originally I was getting permission denied, so I set the file to 744, now I get the following:

/home/<user name>/public_html/cron.php: line 1: ?php: No such file or directory
/home/<user name>/public_html/cron.php: line 2: //: is a directory
/home/<user name>/public_html/cron.php: line 4: /aquota.user: Permission denied
/home/<user name>/public_html/cron.php: line 5: access-logs: command not found
/home/<user name>/public_html/cron.php: line 6: syntax error near unexpected token `('
/home/<user name>/public_html/cron.php: line 6: ` * Handles incoming requests to fire off regularly-scheduled tasks (cron jobs).'

I replaced my username with <user name> above.

Any ideas?

[xan]

Forget this, I have now done some more searching online and used the following:

/usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.domain.com/cron.php

And this works. So it's solved, unless anyone knows of a better solution.

[Gwaihir]

You were running the script without telling cron that it is a php script. Looks like it tries to handle it as a shell script (a series of shell commands).

Instead of /home/<user name>/public_html/cron.php, the command to run is php -f /home/<user name>/public_html/cron.php . I.e. you tell cron to run php and tell php to run your script.


The downside of the wget approach is that your script must be accessible from the internet. I.e. anyone who will access http://www.domain.com/cron.php will be running that script at any time. This could be akward for a variety of reasons. So, if you stick with wget, you'll probably want to add password protection.

[jason]

So, if you stick with wget, you'll probably want to add password protection.

Or restrict access to that script to localhost.

If I were you, though, I'd go with Gwaihir's first sucggestion and set up the cron job to run PHP and have PHP run the script. I'd also move the cron.php out of the public_html directory so that it isn't accessible to the web at all, that way you don't have to worry about anyone finding it accidently.

--Jason

[xan]

Ah, didn't even think about adding a command for a local script.. This was the first time I have used cron jobs.

It is a Drupal setup, but I modified the cron.php to check the last time it was successfully run and not to re-run it if it was completed the last hour.

I will probably leave it with wget for now though.

[jason]

I wouldn't worry too much about running the Drupal cron through the web, nor about how often it runs. It isn't doing a whole lot except cleaning up junk it the database and stuff like that. I supposed some modules could do other things with it, but any of the ones I've used don't seem to do anything too taxing or overly sensitive with cron. If someone runs it out of schedule, oh well, no big deal.

--Jason