Crontab is a utility tool on Unix-like OS that enables you to make a program daemon scheduled to run at a specified interval. For example, to fetch news feed and import them into your own database every hour on the hour or to send pre-written newsletters at a given time everyday.
With DreamHost you can easily add Crontab jobs at their proprietary web panel, but there are 2 tricks.
With PHP, you can specify the version to run the script, PHP4 or PHP5. DreamHost has both popular php versions installed at different locations:
/*PHP4: */
/usr/local/bin/php
/*PHP5: */
/usr/local/php5/bin/php
With any PHP script, you can always achieve the same results with lynx -dump command that accesses and loads the script as any other browsers would do, thus making the server run the script.
Also it’s required to add this line:
#!/usr/local/bin/php -q
at the top before <?php declaration if you are configuring crontab in command line mode rather than adding it from the web panel of DreamHost.