Question

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pass crontab a variable and read it from PHP?

Quick question: is there a way to cron job a single command line in a php script rather than execute the whole script? I’d like to only execute a specific “submit” command from the part of the script that handles the UI.

This would essentially mimic the clicking of the correlating button on a web page.

I’ll be using cpanel to execute it.

Answer 1

One option would be to pass some $_GET parameters to the command that executes the cron job. If your command is –

wget http://localhost/site/cron_job.php

The you’d be able to add something like this –

wget http://localhost/site/cron_job.php?action=submit

Then in your cron_job.php file, you can execute a switch command on your action parameter.

switch($_GET['action']){
  case 'submit':
    // handle submit actions
  break;
  default :
    // handle unknown actions. 
  break;
}

It would be fitting to mention here the importance of sanitization. You are receiving parameters that could potentially be tampered with by the users. Make sure that you only accept your defined actions and that you are indeed receiving expected inputs.