Email from crontab saying:- short_open_tag is Off (must be On!)

Well, I checked my php.ini and short_open_tag is on, otherwise dolphin would not work, and instead show a lot of script lines between <? and ?> in the browser:-

php.ini

; This directive determines whether or not PHP will recognize code between
; <? and ?> tags as PHP source which should be processed as such

short_open_tag = On

Which tell me that the dolphin script can't tell if it's on or off, and thus removal of the cron job stops the constant emails being sent.

Cron is run using the command line version(CLI) of php. It does not use the same php.ini file as the rest of the scripts run by apache.

if you have a php.ini file in the root of your dolphin website you can tell cron to use it by passing the path to it.

Example.

Normal cron command.

cd /home/user/public_html/periodic; /usr/local/bin/php -q cron.php

New one with path to phi.ini added.

cd /home/user/public_html/periodic; /usr/local/bin/php -c /home/user/public_html/php.ini -q cron.php


Your paths may be different, but this illustrates what needs to be done to correct the problem.

I have both php and php5 in /usr/bin locations:- /usr/bin/php and /usr/bin/php5

A file search of php.ini results is 3 ini files:-

/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
/etc/php5/fastcgi/php.ini
/etc/php5/cli/php.ini

Presumably, I would use this one:- /etc/php5/cli/php.ini for the cron?

But which php CLI? php or php5?

The instructions i gave you above was for share hosting that does not have direct access to the php.ini file. So ignore that post.

I was not aware you had dedicated hosting.

you should be using the php5 version. but i do not know if your calling that version with your cron command. So i do not know.

But, it's a short open tag setting and it not going to hurt anything to enable it in all of them. My guess would be this one. /etc/php5/cli/php.ini