Running a background process on an ecommerce website

Question

Hi, I have programmed in C/C++, but I have no experience in web programming. Someone asked me to help them build a e-commerce website selling a service. I started looking into using PHP/MySQL for building the site.

My question is: given that HTTP is stateless, how do we get some background process to trigger so that it may, for instance, gather the list of customers and then send an email with the list in it to some known email address? I want this task to run, say every day at a set time, and not only when a user accesses or performs some action on the site.

Answer 1

You will want to use a cron job.

My favorite tutorial: http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html

Answer 2

Cron job?

Maybe this will help: http://www.thesitewizard.com/general/set-cron-job.shtml