creating cron job script

[vhogarth]

I want to implement a cron job to dump my database everynight at like 2am and have the filename include the time/date. How do i go about doing so. I have no experience with cron jobs. Can someone hook a brotha up? If you've implemented one, can you share? If not, can you point me to where i can get more info? Thanks.

[Mandibal]

If no one responds with help by tomorrow morning (U.S. eastern time) I have exactly what your looking for at work on my development computer. I'll post what I have then. I'm not a shell scripting guru and can't recall the specifics otherwise I'd help ya out right now.

[nos]

Start by writing the script (it can be bash, php, perl, whatever your familiar with). The simply create a cron entry that calls the script.


To run every day at 2am you would want a cron entry like:

02 * * * * * /path/to/yourscript

Have a look at mysqldump, its really easy to run a shell command like:

mysqldump -u username -ppassword database > somefile.txt

Which will echo the results of your command to STDOUT.

So, you could do something like:

#!/usr/bin/php -q  // Assuming this is where you php executable is
$filename =  '/full/path/tofile/' . date('d-m-Y') . '.sql';
$cmd = `mysqldump -u username -ppassword database > $filename`; 

Make that script executable (chmod +x yourscript) and that should do it.

[HarryR]

To run every day at 2am you would want a cron entry like:

02 * * * * * /path/to/yourscript

That would run every hour at 2 minutes past, to run at 02:01am every day you'd use:

01 02 * * * /command/whatever

[vhogarth]

Start by writing the script (it can be bash, php, perl, whatever your familiar with). The simply create a cron entry that calls the script.


To run every day at 2am you would want a cron entry like:

02 * * * * * /path/to/yourscript

Have a look at mysqldump, its really easy to run a shell command like:

mysqldump -u username -ppassword database > somefile.txt

Which will echo the results of your command to STDOUT.

So, you could do something like:

#!/usr/bin/php -q  // Assuming this is where you php executable is
$filename =  '/full/path/tofile/' . date('d-m-Y') . '.sql';
$cmd = `mysqldump -u username -ppassword database > $filename`; 

Make that script executable (chmod +x yourscript) and that should do it.

I'll have to give that a try tomorrow when I have my wits about me, im a lil messed up right now (liquor) so i dont even want to attempt something i havent done before. Thanks for the feedback.

[nos]

Whoops, nice catch HarryR. Glad you caught that, would have hated to have passed on bad information to someone.