I have a website in PHP and users can schedule message to be sent. I can sent message with command similar to this one:
php sendMsg.php 249
where number is ID of the message
Many people suggested to use cron jobs, but since I don't want to run this in interval cron is no option(only once - for example after 3 hours). My idea was as follows:
$seconds = $hours*60*60;
exec('sleep '.$seconds.'; php sendMsg.php 249');
But this wont work because it will block php for further executing. What is the simplest way to achieve this?
Ignore suggestions of cron, if you want to simply wait a period of time then use the at scheduler:
$hours = 2;
$command = sprintf('echo "php sendMsg.php 249" | at now + %d hours', $hours);
exec($command);
Put the schedule in a database. Run a cronjob every minute or so, check the database if a message should be sent within this minute, and send it.
Is there a reason you don't want to use a cron job? That would be the simplest and most efficient way of sending the messages.
I would think that a cronjob ist still the right way
You said you don't want to use a cron job because you only want the message sent once, but this is mis-understanding the way that a cron job would be written for this kind of task
Consider a situation where you have many users creating many messages to be sent at various given points in time.
You don't want to have a PHP program sitting running on your server all that time for each of those messages; it would be wasteful of server resources, even if they were all just sleep()ing for the duration.
Instead, one would use a cron job to run a short-lived PHP program once every minute (or whatever interval suits you).
Your message creation program would not be written to acually send the message; instead it would insert it into a database, along with the time it needs to be sent.
Meanwhile, the cronjob PHP program would scan this database every minute to see if there are any messages that are due to send but have not yet been sent. It would then send those messages and mark them as 'sent' on the DB.
This is the standard way to write this kind of thing, so it's not surprising that people are recommending it to you.
Doing it this way means that you never have a program running on your system for longer than necessary. Both PHP programs do their job quickly and exit, meaning that no-one is kept waiting for them.
It also makes it much more robust. Imagine if your server had to be rebooted. If you had a bunch of PHP programs running for hours waiting for their moment to send their message, they'd all be lost. On the other hand, if they had saved their message to a DB, the cron job would find them and send them correctly once the server was restarted.