Having issues running locally hosted PHP automatically

[acompletenoob]

Hey all, I'm a COMPLETE newcomer to coding and am having a big issue. It seems complicated (to me) so I'll try to lay it out so it's easy to understand.

Basically, I'm using MAMP on Windows 7 to run a PHP script that calls NextBus for real-time bus data, which then is stored into a SQL database. When I start up the MAMP server and enter the PHP's address <http://localhost/php/getbuses.php>, it successfully populates the specified SQL database and columns.

However, I need to run this code automatically every 2 minutes for a single 24 hour period, with the data going to the SQL database for every two-minute call. I learned that I need to create a cron job with Windows Task Scheduler that calls a .bat file that then calls the PHP file. So I created a file called cron.bat which has the following line of code in it:

C:\MAMP\bin\php\php5.5.7\php.exe -f C:\MAMP\htdocs\php\getbuses.php

After that, I created a schedule task in Windows Task Scheduler. I scheduled it to run the cron.bat file daily, and went into advanced options to make it run every X minutes.

BUT I am having no luck getting it to work. The schedule task doesn't take place, and when I open cron.bat, I get a quick command prompt message flashed at me for a split second: "."

Is there something really obvious that I'm missing? I made sure to have MAMP servers running, and still nothing.

Also, just in case for reference, here is the body for the getbuses.php script (which again, works fine when I open it through MAMP):

<?php
    /* 

    Gets NextBus location data for MBTA buses and saves it in a database.

    */

    $data = simplexml_load_file("http://webservices.nextbus.com/service/publicXMLFeed?command=vehicleLocations&a=mbta&t=0");
    $time = round($data->lastTime['time']/1000);

    /* Connect to the MySQL database where the data will be stored.
        This assumes that there is a table named 'bus' with the following fields:
        vehicle (varchar)
        route (varchar)
        lat (float)
        lon (float)
        time (int)
    */
    $host = "localhost";
    $username = "root";
    $password = "root";
    $dbname = "busdata";
    $mysqli = new mysqli( $host, $username, $password, $dbname );
    

    foreach($data->vehicle as $veh){
        $query = "INSERT INTO bus (vehicle,route,lat,lon,time) VALUES (".$veh['id'].",".$veh['routeTag'].",".$veh['lat'].",".$veh['lon'].",".($time - $veh['secsSinceReport']).")";
        print_r(" ".($time - $veh['secsSinceReport']));
        $result = $mysqli->query( $query );
    }

    //$dayAgo = time()-86400;
    //$mysqli->query( "DELETE FROM bus WHERE time < $dayAgo" );
?>

THANKS A TON!

(Also cross-posted in:
CodingForums.com/mysql
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/forum/159-mysql/)

[PeejAvery]

Have you tried putting "pause" at the end of the .bat file to see what the output is?