Getting cron job error because of <?php tag

Question

I've set up a cron job to run. It executes a php file which is named cronj.php But it doesn't work and cron job notification I get is:

/root/website/myworld/blabla/cronj.php: line 1: ?php: No such file or directory

And line 1 in that file is simply a php tag <?php I don't know how

Answer 1

Cron is executing the file as if it was a shell script. Normally you would put in a shebang line (like #!/usr/bin/env php) at the top of the file so that the shell knows how to invoke it, but PHP doesn't like it - as it outputs everything outside its tags. Thus, instead of this:

0     3     *     *     *         /mypath/myscript.php ...

try this:

0     3     *     *     *         /usr/bin/env php /mypath/myscript.php ...

or use @Ravenex's trick.

EDIT I was just rightly admonished for assuming PHP behaves in a consistent way. Apparently, shebang does work in PHP. My apologies to @chess007.

Answer 2

We use cron to run nightly tasks in a php facebook game. We do it by using curl like this:

/usr/bin/curl http://www.ourdomain.com/page.php

If I remember right we had some issues using localhost to try to avoid external lookups. Also we tried using php command line execution, which mostly worked but caused a few strange bugs.

Answer 3

Try to call the web url (http://.....).

It's apparently not parsing it as an PHP script.

Edit: Please show use the cronjob you used, to verify my hunch was right.

Answer 4

Use this to set your cron and also give email address in your cron setting Cpanel so that you get an email when cron runs successfully

wget -O - http://YOURSITE/cron.php