如何在服务器上连续执行程序？ 以及使用哪种语言？

Question

Okay this is my first post here so please forgive me if i mess something up.

I am trying to build a web program that will send email with content drawn from a db at a time specified in the db to a email address specified in the db. I am fluent in php & mysql and initially assumed i would base this program on those languages but i cant figure out how to use php to achieve my purpose. So i assume i will have to turn to another language, but i haven't the vaguest idea of which to turn to.

My other problem is that i don't know how to setup whatever script i end up making to run continuously.

Thanks for the suggestion Russ, to begin with it will be hosted locally either on my centos box or my xampp server, probably the later until it is working properly and i don't know about the future as it is just an idea right now.

EDIT: I actually did this in perl, it did end up a little different than originally planned but it worked so im happy.

Thanks to all who answered.

Answer 1

If you are concerning only on how to schedule the send email function, you can try some open source scheduler like

http://www.phpjobscheduler.co.uk/

Answer 2

Crontab with PHP can do what you want. See: Newbie: Intro to cron

You can also write a PHP daemon to do the job.

Answer 3

MySQL has events that can run every day/hour/minute.

See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/events.html

It's generally a bad idea to let the DB-server (MySQL) run external program though because that's a security risk.
So let the DB handle DB events and let crontab handle unix events.
Windows has the at command.

Answer 4

You need to use Cronjobs to achieve your goal.

You can find more info about how to use here .