Relative path not working in cron PHP script

Question

If a PHP script is run as a cron script, the includes often fail if relative paths are used. For example, if you have

require_once('foo.php'); 

the file foo.php will be found when run on the command line, but not when run from a cron script.

A typical workaround for this is to first chdir to the working directory, or use absolute paths. I would like to know, however, what is different between cron and shell that causes this behavior. Why does it fail when using relative paths in a cron script?

Answer 1

Change the working directory to the running file path. Just use

chdir(dirname(__FILE__)); include_once '../your_file_name.php'; //we can use relative path after changing directory 

in the running file. Then you won't need to change all the relative paths to absolute paths in every page.