Cron not passing params to PHP script

Question

I have a cron job set like

php /home/novinarb/public_html/index.php --uri=\"cron/24satahr\"

but the \'uri\' param doesn\'t get to the php

Answer 1

Is the php script running at all?

I suspect you need to provide the full path to php in your crontab line. Even though cron jobs run as you, they don't have any of your login environment set up; this means they don't have your $PATH.

Answer 2

I was facing the same problem but was able to fix it after reading the manual entry for php.

Initially I had something set like:

/usr/bin/php -f /path/to/php/script.php -c 1426 >> /tmp/script.php.log 2>&1

I was able to fix it by changing the line to:

/usr/bin/php -f /path/to/php/script.php -- -c 1426 >> /tmp/script.php.log 2>&1

As per the manual entry the syntax is:

php [options] [ -f ] file [[--] args...]

Also,

 args...        Arguments passed to script. Use '--' args when first argument starts with '-' or script is read from stdin

Going by that, my cron command becomes:

/usr/bin/php -f /path/to/php/script.php -- -c 1426 >> /tmp/script.php.log 2>&1

and it works!

Answer 3

A more robust method would be to accept command-line arguments in your PHP script with getopt() or $argv and making it executable. An example with $argv called script.php:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
  if (isset($argv[1])):
    echo $argv[1];
  endif;
?>

Make it executable:

chmod +x script.php

And execute:

./script.php "cron/24satahr"

Will output:

cron/24satahr