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What do I put for the cron job Command ?

Command lines. Examples only! Bold sections must be changed.

Shared, Reseller, SEO hosting, and other (VPS and Dedicated with Easy Apache 3 installed)

PHP

Command to run a PHP5 cron job:
php /home/user_name123/public_html/cron.php

Optional flag sometimes required for a PHP cron job:
php -q /home/user_name123/public_html/cron.php

Command to run a PHP4 cron job:
/usr/local/php4/bin/php /home/user_name123/public_html/cron.php

All hosting types

More

Command to GET a remote file:
/usr/bin/GET http://www.some-domain.com/file.php

Command to run a CGI cron job:
perl /home/user_name123/public_html/cgi-bin/file.pl

SSH Extras

Command to run a shell script cron job:
/bin/sh /home/user_name123/public_html/file.sh

Command to import a database:
mysql -u mysql_user -ppassword database_name < backup.sql

Command to export a database:
mysqldump -u mysql_user -ppassword database_name > backup.sql


VPS and Dedicated without Easy Apache 3 (unlikely, we install EA3 by default)

PHP

Command to run for a PHP4 cron job:
/usr/bin/php /home/user_name123/public_html/cron.php

Command to run for a PHP5 cron job:
/usr/local/php5/bin/php5 /home/user_name123/public_html/cron.php

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Article Comments

Craig
I would also add that you can redirect your error output to a file of your choice by appending 2>>/path/to/error.log to the end of your command.

Since you can't view /var/log/cron on shared servers, this is the only way to see if there is an error when your script runs.

Probably a no brainer for the experienced, but would have saved me a lot of time had I known sooner. :-)
Posted: April 10, 2010
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Posted: December 13, 2011 (Global Reply)
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