Running a PHP script every 5 minutes and avoiding race conditions

Chairpoint

New Member
I have a php script that needs to run once every 5 minutes. Currently I'm using a cron job to run it (and it works great) but my host only allows a minimum time of 15 minutes.So my question is, can I use visitors to trigger the running of a php script every 5 minutes. I can easily just record the last time it ran, and re-run it based on elapsed time.However, I'm worried about race conditions. It is important that the script only gets run once every 5 minutes.My script takes about 60 seconds to run. It writes to a couple files during this time. If the script ran more than once it would corrupt files. Also, if I get no vistors for 10 minutes, then running once when the next vistor arrives is fine.Is there some standard way to accomplish this task?Thanks!
 
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