I need a script that will hit a URL at recurring intervals throughout the day. I would like to be able to just start it and let it run on a server in my office. Any ideas on where I could find something like this? I'd do a search but I really don't know what to search for. thx
If you have a unix box, all you need to do is use cron and curl. Cron is a task scheduler and curl will just grab a url. If it's a windows box, you can use task scheduler and then write a little batch file that you can schedule. Just write a batch file that telnets to port 80 of the website you want then does "Get /". -Erik
the problem is that I don't have a unix machine to run this and I know jack about writing batch files. Could I have the file be started by task scheduler and then run several times a day?
Check out VisualCron from http://www.visualcron.com . Note, I've never used it and only just found it then. However, it's free and allows you to add HTTP jobs (as in jobs that will hit a URL)...
D'oh. Sorry... it's a 45 day trial. If you don't want to use that, you can still try something like cronw from http://cronw.sourceforge.net/ to run your jobs and curl from http://curl.haxx.se to do the actual 'page get'.
How often do you want it to run? You could just leave your browser open with a meta refresh every 10 minutes or something if you want to avoid a cron job. Or you could use AJAX to load the page every 10 minutes and have a JS to count the time Maybe if you explained what the script is going to do we can suggest the best solution.
Depending on how often you want a page hit, you could just use a website monitering service that checks a site every so often. Just give it the page you want hit. Some of the free ones don't check it all that often so it would depend on the frequency you needed. There are a bunch out there, here is one.
I have seen a script that runs on the windows desktop and does what you want to do. So as Mulder would say, "it's out there". If I find it I will post the link.
I'd like it to run every hour or couple of hours. I need a script that will call or hit (sorry if i don't know the correct term ) a URL. For example the URL www.site.com/site/sitescript.php. I know I could do this with a browser refreshing the page every hour or so but I'd rather have a script running on a server do this because I feel it would be more reliable. To clarify, my server is not the server hosting the site. The site is sitting on a shared hosting account at godaddy.
For anyone interested, I found a pretty slick web based cron job service. It is exactly what I was looking for. You can find it here: http://www.webbasedcron.com/index.php Thanks for everyone's help.
I am late to this party but here is something else you can do. Use microsoft scheduler it is already on your computer. Click the help button on your Start button and look for Scheduled Tasks