stopping a script being manually triggered

[richardjh]

Hello

I have a script which when triggered by a cron job will dump a list of articles to my site (dumping twice a week - Monday and Friday). I've noticed that this script has started to trigger at times other than the cron settings and I am surmising that either a robot or perhaps a real human has stumbled upon the script and triggered it at these times.

Is there a  way to tweak the script so that it will only trigger via a cron task and not if someone or something (robot) requests the page via the browser?

 

thanks for advice

R

[trq]

Move it out of any web accessible folder and execute it via php's cli and not via an http request.

[DeanWhitehouse]

Can you put the page in a folder where bots dont go, because i assume yourr site has google etc. running bots on it.

 

Also try no-index meta tags etc.

[richardjh]

I'll look into Thorpe's idea of having the script called using cli rather than http but that approach all looks rather daunting!

 

thanks for the advice

 

would eregi work? e.g. if the script is called directly then have the script die?

 

if (!eregi($PHP_SELF)) {
die ("No direct access!");
    }

 

Although this bit of code doesn't seem to work but you get the gist of what I'm trying to say.

[.josh]

I'll look into Thorpe's idea of having the script called using cli rather than http but that approach all looks rather daunting!

 

thanks for the advice

 

would eregi work? e.g. if the script is called directly then have the script die?

 

if (!eregi($PHP_SELF)) {
die ("No direct access!");
    }

 

Although this bit of code doesn't seem to work but you get the gist of what I'm trying to say.

 

So...moving a file from one folder to another is a daunting task?

[richardjh]

I've moved the file to a new folder too

 

 

[DarkWater]

He means outside of the webserver folders.

[DeanWhitehouse]

I wasn't sure whether it still works outside the webfolder, thats why i didn't say.

[DarkWater]

I wasn't sure whether it still works outside the webfolder, thats why i didn't say.

 

I don't think that a lot of people who post in threads about cron actually know what it is; they just (almost) know what it does.