Php – Cron job creating empty file each time it runs

cronPHP

I have a php script I want to run every minute to see if there are draft news posts that need to be posted. I was using "wget" for the cron command in cPanel, but i noticed (after a couple days) that this was creating a blank file in the main directory every single time it ran. Is there something I need to stop that from happening?

Thanks.

Best Answer

You need to send the output of that wget command to /dev/null if you want to avoid creating a file of the (blank) response from your php script.

Example in curl

curl -q http://your.server/script.php > /dev/null

Example in wget

wget -q -O /dev/null http://your.server/script.php

If you have the choice, you should use curl, that is a better tool for this job.

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The command wget is a good solution for this problem if you are accessing a script on a remote server. However, if you are running the cronjob on the actual host that is "mydomain.com" you may just want to schedule crobjob to execute the code sitting at /process/2909.

For example, we have some PHP jobs that we execute with cron. Rather than using an HTTP request that could take minutes (and potentially cause timeout issues) we setup a cronjob that calls "php5 /srv/cronJobs/2909.php" - This invokes the PHP interpreter and is not subject to HTTP timeouts. Additionally, this PHP process is separate from Apache so the scheduled job will not die in case a sysadmin restarts httpd.

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You need to write a shell script like this that sleeps on the specified interval and schedule that to run every minute in cron:

#!/bin/sh
# Script: delay_cmd
sleep $1
shift
$*

Then schedule that to run in cron with your parameters: delay_cmd 15 mycommand parameters

Best Answer

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