pass crontab a variable and read it from PHP?

Question

I have created a crontab rule:

* * * * * php /my/directory/file.php

I want to pass a variable to be used in the file.php from this crontab.

Answer 1

Neither of the above methods worked for me. I run cron on my hoster's shared server. The cron task is created with the cPanel-like interface. The command line calls PHP passing it the script name and a couple arguments.

That is how the command line for cron looks:

php7.2 /server/path/to/my/script/my-script.php "test.tst" "folder=0"

Neither of the answers above with $argv worked for my case.

The issue was noone told you have to declare $argv as global before you get the access to the CLI arguments. This is neither mentioned in the official PHP manual.

Well, probably one has to declare $argv global ony for scripts run with server. Maybe in a local environment running script in CLI $argv does not require being declared global. When I test it I post here.

But nevertherless for my case the working configuration is:

global $argv;
echo "argv0: $argv[0]\n\r"; // echoes: argv0: /server/path/to/my/script/my-script.php
echo "argv1: $argv[1]\n\r"; // echoes: argv1: test.tst
echo "argv2: $argv[2]\n\r"; // echoes: argv2: folder=0

I got the same results with $_SERVER['argv'] superglobal array. One can make use of it like this:

 $myargv = $_SERVER['argv'];
 echo $myargv[1]; // echoes: test.tst

Hope that helps somebody.