UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Okay, here's the situation: I have a UNIX box hosting a website. The website is basically there to hold a .swf file; when you go to the URL, the .swf file loads, and it pulls data from a database on another computer into a cache. The cache holds things for 24 hours. This all works fine, so it's really just background.

The real problem is that I want some way to go to the site every 24 hours (or thereabouts) automatically and start the process of pulling data into the cache. Unfortunately, wget doesn't seem to do this (it only downloads the .swf file, or the .html file containing it). Is there some other UNIX command that I can put in a cron job to accomplish this task, or am I going to have to start fiddling with the underlying machinery?

That is because wget simply downloads the .swf but not being able to play it. If the flash movie is not executed, nothing will happen. So, what you need is to play the movie from the command line.

I don't think you can use the Adobe flash player for this. On Linux, there is an open source version of the Flash player with command line-based control of playback. Even though I don't truly think it works well for you, there's no loss giving it a try.

Gnash Project |

Let us know how it goes.

Eheh...uh, actually, I still haven't gotten around to installing it. It requires this big list of other things to be installed first, and they have other things that need to be installed, and it's a big, confusing mess.

EDIT: You saw nothing. It was just swamp gas reflected off a weather balloon.

cause you are new to unix.com the post needs to be approved if you post links. you'll get a note about that when you post a new reply!

Ah, okay then. Err...please ignore the doublepost then. (Doublepost? I see no doublepost. )

At the risk of embarrassing myself again, the message got cut off somehow, sooo: it turns out the box I'm using runs OpenSuSE, and already has Firefox installed. If I were to install the Flash Player for Linux, maybe I could run Firefox from the command line or something? Maybe I should be asking this over on the Mozilla forums...

Try this in your crontab (replace with your path to firefox if diff of course):

Code:

/usr/bin/firefox <URL>

Also just try it from the terminal. It will open the URL in firefox and should refresh your cache.

Cheers....cassj