   php cron question
  ok... before i give the question that i posted in another forum, heres the scoop, i am making a php game that is text-based, turn-based, and browser-based, i am programming it on a win 2k pro computer, and will have a linux server.Now the question(simplified!):How do you do cron, and do i really need to use program that targets a page like every 5 minutes or something?  Or is there a type of script like &#106avascript, that no one needs to view the page for it to do it, or is there a way to set the database to do it on its own.   
  Your best bet is either a cron job or just a local server application that goes through and updates the database. Most PHP scripts will terminate after n minutes (depending on your server configuration) iirc.For the former, you'll need to modify your crontab file (or use the at command in Unix); this is more of a question for Everything Unix, but feel free to read the intro to cron.   ;  Windows does not have a cron system. It does have windows scheduler, which is not as efficient as it's cron counterpart. You can write similar code for running scripts in the command line, the argument generally follows the style of:php -f somepathAn alternative method is to spawn seperate processes for time intensive operations like processing many hundreads of turn actions based on the next time a page is run.Alternatively, I do not suggest that you use the sleep function in php, because in windows it is not very well implemented. (Sleep works better on linux, ditto for crons..)   ;  If you are trying to "update" the game, you can have &#106avascript ask the server for more data every X increments of time. That's a lot easier on the server too. This sounds like a job for AJAX. If you haven't already, look into it's fundamental technologies and see if it works for your situation.   