I am running AWS image with MySQL server installed. I am trying to run a php DB backup script but have a few basic questions. I have installed php. Is there a specific dir where all php scripts must reside/ launched from?

I have searched several forums but none address such basic questions...thx for the help!

Hi, welcome to LQ!

First things first: what is this AWS you're referring to?

In general PHP scripts are "launched" (run/executed/...) in a web-environment.

If AWS (?) expects other means, try using cron, the OSes way of executing
scheduled tasks.


Cheers,
Tink



P.S.: When asking questions it's sound to assume that people know nothing about
your set-up, so providing essential information ahead of time is going to give
you a far better chance of helpful responses.
E.g.:
I'm running AWS, a <.......> product on a LAMP stack w/ apache2 2.1.14 on
moohluntu 10.10 ....

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PHP (PHP hypertext Preprocessor) is mostly a web based language for creating web appliations. However it does have command line access when you install the php-cli modules. So to answer your questions you can try by typeing the following to get the include_paths which contain the default scripts used by the php language engine
or you can execute a script by typing

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Thanks guys for your responses. Allow me to clarify, AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. I have a virtual machine running an image of CentOS 5x hosting MYSQL. I want to automate backups of several schema. To accomplish this I am using a php script that I run from terminal. Eventually I would like to run a cron job, but at this point I'm simply testing out the script. Since I am an absolute newbie, I was trying to rule out that I had placed the backup script in the incorrect dir to account for the errors that I am getting (e.g. :command not found, /: is a directory, and syntax error)

php -1 | grep include_path yielded this:

.:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php =>.:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php

I don't know what this means. Is this the dir I should execute .php from?

I tried to > result of script to a txt file, but is resulted in an empty file:

./php_script.php > ~/user/dir/errorlog.txt


Again, thank you very much for the help ;-)

Well.. if you're using MySQL I'd not bother trying to take back-ups from
php; unnecessary overhead.

Have a look at

Unless you need to be able to do ad-hoc backups via a webinterface, that is.
But even then it's probably easiest to install myPHPadmin, and do it from
there ...



Cheers,
Tink

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Thanks for the suggestion, Tinkster. Will mysqldump shutdown/stop mysql server while it's backup? My main object is to backup the database gracefully.

mysqldump locks the DB internally to guarantee a consistent data set, which is why its recommended to use that instead of doing your own code.
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysqldump.html

For cron http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference.
NB: cron has a minimal env inc PATH settings, so always specify complete/absolute paths to cmds and files used by a cron job.

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