No luck on on the __FILE__ approach. I played with permissions before but maybe will do so again. Sigh... thanks for the help, though.
Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to modify spider.php (or create a new file altogether) that took info as GET arguments, so a cron job could just be set up with a "curl"? Something like...
Code:
curl http://www.mydomain.com/phpdig/spider_curl.php?d=www.mydomain.com&depth=6
(Or something like that). Seems like that might be a reasonably easy workaround, but I dunno...