How do I use curl in a cron job?

I need to set up a cron job in cpanel that calls a URL (on the same server) once a week. I was going to use wget but it turns out this is disabled on the shared server being used.

Is there an alternative to wget? I've heard that curl can be used but I don't know how to set that up in a cron command.

Also, what's the command to make the cronjob do nothing on completion?

Any ideas greatly appreciated!

instead of using wget, curl works like this:

curl --silent http://domain.com/cron.php

which will work in the same way as wget. if its a php file you are launching, is there any reason you cant run it via the command line php interpreter like so:

php -q /path/to/cron.php

same on a webserver request and often will work much faster and without certain timeout restrictions present when called via webserver/curl

If curl is available you could try something like

1 1 * * 0  /usr/bin/curl --silent http://example.come/some.php &>/dev/null

That should cause curl to be completely silent so you don't get any email from it on completion.

I'd suggest to add "-m" parameter in addition to --silent as this parameter sets the maximum time allowed for the transfer. Imagine you call the cron every minute and the script takes 2mins - this can have bad impact on the server load or other things.

1 1 * * 0  /usr/bin/curl -m 120 -s http://example.come/some.php &>/dev/null