Shell Script to hit a url

Hi all, I have a php file that grabs xml, parses it and updates my db accordingly. I want to automate the execution of this process, rather than having to hit the url manually.

I have been looking into using cron to execute a script to do this, however i'm not exactly sure what command i would use in a shell script or perl script, or which is easier for that matter

any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

If you are asking for a way to automate loading a certain url, then look into curl or wget, both are excellent commandline http clients.