I have had problems with cron jobs before where i couldn't find the location of the file i wanted to use so i have been using a script that runs the file when some one visits a page, but this isn't accurate enough, because if no body is online then the file won't get run at all. so i tried cron jobs again, this time i worked out the location of my file, but i get loads of errors when it is run, this is what i get in my email:

/vetinari/nacropet/public_html/admin/restock.php: line 1: ?php: No such file or directory
/vetinari/nacropet/public_html/admin/restock.php: line 2: syntax error near unexpected token `"connect.php"'
/vetinari/nacropet/public_html/admin/restock.php: line 2: `include ("connect.php"); '

so i thought maybe you can't include files in a cron job so i put contents of connect.php into the file i'm running but i get this error:

/vetinari/nacropet/public_html/admin/restock.php: line 1: ?php: No such file or directory
/vetinari/nacropet/public_html/admin/restock.php: line 2: syntax error near unexpected token `('
/vetinari/nacropet/public_html/admin/restock.php: line 2: `$db = mysql_connect("localhost", "###", "###") or die("Could not connect.");

how can i make this work? is there something you have to add to the file?

I think you have to specify where the PHP interpreter is, because crontab itself cannot parse PHP.

Try adding the path to your PHP executable before the filename. For example:

<timing stuff> /usr/local/bin/php /path/to/myfile.php

And I searched Google, you could also create a shell script with a PHP shebang:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q
<your code here>

Then put the path to that shell script.

thank you, i just put /usr/local/bin/php before the location of the file and it worked