Using CRON jobs to visit url?

Question

I have a web application that has to perform a repeated tasks, Sending messages and alerts, I, already, use a script page do those tasks when it loaded in the browser i.e http://example.com/tasks.php and I included it by the mean of iframe in every page of my web application.

Now I want to change this to use CRON jobs because the first approach may leads to jam performance, So How could I make a CRON job that visits http://example.com/tasks.php. However, I don't want this CRON job creating output files such as day.*!

I host the application on shared hosting service that permits CRON jobs via cPanel.

Answer 1

* * * * * wget -O - http://yoursite.com/tasks.php >/dev/null 2>&1

That should work for you. Just have a wget script that loads the page.

Using -O - means that the output of the web request will be sent to STDOUT (standard output)

by adding >/dev/null we instruct standard output to be redirect to a black hole. by adding 2>&1 we instruct STDERR (errors) to also be sent to STDOUT, and thus all output will be sent to a blackhole. (so it will load the website, but never write a file anywhere)