Question

I’m working on a site in php. Is it possible to send cron jobs at times defined by an algorithm? Could I add such a functionally in the console or send it from my php script? I haven’t used cron yet.

Answer 1

The first thing that comes to the mind – run a cron job every minute with php script which generates random number in order to check whether to run the rest of the job.
This line in crontab will run cron job every minute (replace paths with yours)

*/1 * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/job.php

Or if you can’t directly call php, you may use curl or wget like that

*/1 * * * * /usr/bin/curl --silent --compressed http://yoursite.com/job.php

And in your php file do whatever you want to check if it’s time to run the rest of the job, like that:

if(rand(1, 60)==1)
{
 include 'the_actual_job.php';
}