Automatically deleting temporary storage

Question

Not sure how to go about this problem that I have. In my website, visitors will look at my product catalogue and place orders, leaving behind their email for contact. I would like my website to automatically process their product's detailed report and store in a temporary folder for 24 hrs. The link will then be emailed to them with a one-time-password. 24hrs later I want the folder removed from my server.

I believe there are website that work similarly.

Question is: Is there anyway that I can program a script to remove folders that have reached their expiry time (24hrs in this case) since the time it was last written to? Or do I have to personally station myself at the server to delete off this folders everyday?

Answer 1

There is number of way to do this, you can use background process, check the expiry when user requests a report or the simplest solution - cron job. Not sure what technology do you use, but this should be a nice tutorial for PHP:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/managing-cron-jobs-with-php-2/

With ruby on rails you have nice cron support and a railscast explaining it: http://railscasts.com/episodes/164-cron-in-ruby