Disclaimer: I have very little experience with any of this.
My script looks like this:
<?php
file_put_contents('test_php.txt', 'hmm');
And the command in my cron job looks like this
php php_test.php
Nothing is getting written to my root directory. I've used Cron to back up my databases using mysqldump, so I'm familiar with how to set up a cron job. I'm specifically having trouble running a php script this way.