Using WGET to run a cronjob PHP

You could tell wget to not download the contents in a couple of different ways:

wget --spider http://www.example.com/cronit.php

which will just perform a HEAD request but probably do what you want

wget -O /dev/null http://www.example.com/cronit.php

which will save the output to /dev/null (a black hole)

You might want to look at wget's -q switch too which prevents it from creating output

I think that the best option would probably be:

wget -q --spider http://www.example.com/cronit.php

that's unless you have some special logic checking the HTTP method used to request the page

wget -O- http://www.example.com/cronit.php >> /dev/null

This means send the file to stdout, and send stdout to /dev/null

I tried following format, working fine

*/5 * * * * wget --quiet -O /dev/null http://localhost/cron.php

If you want get output only when php fail:

php -r 'echo file_get_contents(http://www.example.com/cronit.php);'

This way you receive an email from cronjob only when the script fails and not whenever the php is called.