We've all seen at one time or another, demos for scripts written in PHP who's database refreshes every hour or so. (i.e. to prevent spammers, and to clear their sites for each amount of users that come through)

How would you go about setting up an automated command to refresh your database's tables every 60min. ?

obviously w/cron jobs, but for anyone completely unfamiliar with crons; some direction please?

Okay, I think I figured out the theory on this...

a) create a script that does "DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `tablename`" then "CREATE TABLE `tablename`" with all it's values.

b) then set script to run at the appointed interval through Cron

you don't need to drop and recreate... just set to TRUNCATE TABLE 'table name' and set cron to 0 */1 * * *

AHA...

thank you

do you want the user in the demo to have full functionality?

if not, an easier method would be to remove editing the MySQL queries from your script and have it display your default values.

Actually there is no need to use a "cron job" at all for something so simple.

Simply check the time when a page is opened and if more than one hour has elapsed run a query to purge the entries.