几小时后PHP运行脚本

Question

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?

Answer 1

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);