UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

i have searched for cronjob, crontab tutorials but none seem to make any sense to me. needless to say i have never used this before. i need to download a product xml feed (images and descriptions) from a remote server and upload it to another server. this has to be done once a week. i was told that cron does this. the details need to be downloaded then uploaded to the database. reading tutorials on this makes no sense to me. its like describing the colour purple to someone who has been blind from birth. i refuse to believe that it is so difficult that i cant get it. http://www.pantz.org/software/cron/croninfo.html just doesnt make sense to me. is there anything better out there?

i know i have posted before on a similar topic but i need to know this so i can get a shop working. in this time of recession i dont fancy looking for another job.

There are two things which you need to differentiate and understand.

1. Setting up a cron job,
2. Writing a script for doing your job.

Its so obvious that the link which you had given is speaking about setting cron job ( normally any link will do that only ) , so if u understand that you can set a cron job.

In the cron job, the command which you are going to give should do the required stuff to achieve the objective.
For that you need to learn shell/perl or any other scripting to do the task.

I hope this makes some sense to you now.

what is cron limited to? so far from what i have read, cronjob runs a script at a designated time. i want to download information from a server. i have not seen any explanations that handle anything like that or am i just looking in the wrong place?

Yes you are right, cron can only run a script at a designated time.

You need to write the script for achieving your objective, there is no relationship b/w cron and script writing.

Learn script writing, write a script, and then call that script in cron job.

@thegeek i am sorry if i seem totally blank with regards to this. thats because i am totally blank to it. i have not used this before so setting up a cronjob and writing a script seemed the same to me. yes i can see that the link is about setting up a job. at the time specified it will run the file that is set. so i am assuming then that the cronjob can be written to execute a download of xml files that will be stored in a specific directory or am i jumpin the gun here?

---------- Post updated at 12:36 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:21 PM ----------

ok, let me see if i understand this. i can write 2 cronjobs. one that will activate a php script to download an xml feed to a specific location on my pc then the other cronjob will activate another script to upload it to my server?[COLOR="#738fbf"]

Write one / two script is specific to your requirement & your design.

But have the picture very clear, the script is for achieving the functionality you wish.

Crontab is, instead of you running the script(s) manually at the specified time, it runs automatically. Hope you got a clear idea now.

well i have had some experience with php, a little experience with mysql as well. i am mainly a front end web dev so back end languages are not my forte.

i understand that cronjob schedule times to run tasks. i suppose i want to know how to run a script that will download a file. so there are 2 scripts that need doing. a cronjob script to schedule the time to execute the download. and the other script is the code that will download said file. like i said, i am a novice at php and totally new to cronjob

cheers for ya help thus far