Ryan Joy (atxryan)

I subscribe to Investor’s Business Daily for insight and valuable education as I gradually learn how to effectively invest in the market. It comes out Monday-Friday and obviously is very time relevant. I initially signed up for the print version so that I could read it on the bus and have something to highlight. However, I ended up never getting it on time because it’d come in while I was at work and I’d end up not even looking at it when I got home. I switched to the electronic version, but then I’d end up not downloading and reading the thing for weeks at a time. I needed an ‘in-your-face’ solution, so I wrote up this little PHP script to automatically download the eIBD every day and a separate shell script to open the PDF at 9am on my computer every weekday morning. So, I essentially have it ‘delivered’ to my desktop when I log on my Mac in the morning!

Here’s an example script to show how I did it. I’ve removed the information specific to IBD. Keep in mind that this script, as presented, does not log in to anything and assumed a filename format like 020508.pdf. I wrote these scripts for Mac OS X 10.4 and used Cronnix to create the crontab entry. It could easily be done on a Windows machine as well using the utilities provided by that system.

<?php
//
// Provided as-is without warranty.
//


$ch = curl_init();
$today = date("mdy")

;if(date("w") == 0) {
  $monday = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m"), date("d")+1, date("y"));
  $today = date("mdy", $monday);
}

if(date("w") ==  6) {
  $monday = mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m"), date("d")+2, date("y"));
  $today = date("mdy", $monday);
}

$pdf_url = "http://www.example.com/pdf/" . "$today.pdf";
$fp = fopen("/Users/username/path/to/pdf/archive/$today.pdf", "w");

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $pdf_url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
fclose($fp);
?>

And the shell script to open the PDF…

DATE=`date '+%m%d%y'`;
FILE=~/path/to/pdf/archive/${DATE}.pdf;
if [ -e $FILE ]; then
  open /Applications/Preview.app $FILE;
fi

And the crontab used to download the PDF each day at 11pm and open the file for me at 9am.

30      23      *       *       *               php /path/to/script.php
0       9       *       *       1,2,3,4,5,7     sh /path/to/pdf_opener.sh

I might clean this up a bit, but I just wanted to share it in case anyone else had a similar need for daily download and view. Feel free to offer suggestions for other ways to achieve this.