CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cronwgetcpanel
ilhan
ilhan

Reputation: 8995

Running a PHP page every minute with CronJob

I have

wget -O /dev/null http://example.com/job.php 2>/dev/null

However I don't know what does it really mean? The only thing I know is that it uses the application called wget and one of the parameters is the page that I want to run. The other things, I have no idea. -O /dev/null and 2>/dev/null?

Note: This is from a cPanel running on FreeBSD.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 388

Answers (2)

fedorqui
fedorqui

Reputation: 290015

This command will not show anything in your screen, neither write any file in your computer.

Let's focus in each part:

wget -O /dev/null http://example.com/job.php 2>/dev/null

/dev/null is a special file that discards all data written to it but reports that the write operation succeeded. (Wikipedia)

So whenever we write or redirect something to /dev/null the data will not be saved.

As wget -O file stands for downloading the webpage to file, wget -O /dev/null will simply download it but will not be found.

Example

$ wget www.google.cat **-o test**
--2013-05-25 16:42:09--  http://www.google.cat/
Resolving www.google.cat (www.google.cat)... 173.194.78.94, 2a00:1450:400c:c05::5e
Connecting to www.google.cat (www.google.cat)|173.194.78.94|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: `index.html'

    [ <=> ] 11,086      --.-K/s   in 0.007s

2013-05-25 16:42:09 (1.62 MB/s) - `test' saved [11086]

$ ll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me 11086 May 25 16:42 test


$ wget www.google.cat **-O /dev/null**
--2013-05-25 16:51:39--  http://www.google.cat/
Resolving www.google.cat (www.google.cat)... 173.194.78.94, 2a00:1450:400c:c06::5e
Connecting to www.google.cat (www.google.cat)|173.194.78.94|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: `/dev/null'

    [ <=> ] 11,118      --.-K/s   in 0.004s  

2013-05-25 16:51:39 (2.66 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [11118]

$ ll
total 0

Regarding the other part:

2>/dev/null

2 stands for stderr. So 2 > /devnull redirects the possible errors of wget execution so that they do not appear in your screen.

You can check some examples or wget usage.

Upvotes: 1

Pruthvi Raj Nadimpalli
Pruthvi Raj Nadimpalli

Reputation: 1373

Your command wget simply sends a GET request to the URL specified.

2> /dev/null -> send errors to /dev/null (means send to nothing).

So errors are not logged.

Upvotes: 2

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