In a previous post, I talked about using cron to do your bidding. If you do a lot of web development like I do, you may have some web based tasks that you need to automate. A good example of this could be clearing a file cache or tipping of a script to rebuild your xml site map.

One of the best ways to do that would to be cURL and cron together. cURL is an application used to transfer the contents of a url. Insistently, to transfer the contents of a url, curl has to connect to that url, and the server has to process that url/script… do you see what I am going with this? cURL can be used to do anything you would normally do from the url of your browser.

This is the usage of cURL:

curl [options] [URL…]

lets say you have the following URL that you want to connect to on a regular schedule
http://SomeDomain.com/SomeFile.php?var1=abc&var2=zyz

you would use the following cURL command:
/usr/bin/curl -G -d var1=abc -d var2=zyz http://SomeDomain.com/SomeFile.php

We are using the “-G” argument to simulate a “GET” command, and each “-d” is a variable/value pair

note: “/usr/bin/curl” is the location on my computer that cURL is installed

running cURL from the command line will show you results that get returned from the processing of the script.

To fully automate this processs, add the curl command into cron. now you are one step closer to world domination!