Scheduled tasks are a fairly common feature in modern web applications. From cleaning out caches every 24 hours to checking subscription periods and even generating reports, more web applications live by the clock than ever before. But how do we schedule the execution of a PHP script on the server side?

He shows the two key things to getting it working - an example of a command-line call to a PHP script (executed through his /usr/bin/php) and an example of a line from a crontab showing how to execute the script at midnight every day.

In this final tutorial of the series I'm going to show you how to manually trigger a destructor, and in addition you'll learn how to emulate the behavior of this magic method when using PHP 4.

They not only talk about how to call the destructor manually but they also show how to call multiple destructors at the same time to destroy lots of objects at once. And, as promised, they include a method for being able to use a destructor-like bit of functionality in a PHP4 app as well.