Cron Jobs

[Maxtr0sity]

Hey, anyone use Cron jobs to do stuff? I'm not sure what exactly it can do and it can't do. Any suggestions? Also, where can I get scripts?

[DigitalPimp]

WTF is a cron job?

[Maxtr0sity]

Never heard of them? I have them since I own a domain, it's in the cPanel Control Panel. It's suppose to backup databasese automatically somehow, but I'm not too sure.

[DigitalPimp]

oh..... That would be host specific. The only people that will know how to use that are people that have the same host as you.

[λ]

A cron job is a script that runs every so often. For instance, you could have a script like this:



<?php
$fileCon = fopen("daysUp.txt", "A+");
fputs($fileCon,"1");
fclose($fileCon);
?>

then you could run this script every day at midnight, and you would have a counter in a textfile of how many days your site had been up.

[Maxtr0sity]

Do I need to put anything in Cron to show that script?

[λ]

I'm sorry, I have no experience actually using cron jobs. I just happen to know what they are :-\

[Maxtr0sity]

Nuts, I tried looking for it online...no one knows too much about them and scripting them.

[nobody]

Max if you don't really know what they are why do you want to use them?

[Maxtr0sity]

Yes, because I liked automated stuff, and my database does need to be backed up.

[λ]

If you need your database backing up, you can use PHPMyAdmin, if your host supports it. There is a built in way of exporting the database to a .cvs file, I believe =)

[Maxtr0sity]

I mean like automatically which I think Cron can do.