Matt Beasant wrote:

Hi there Ramesh and thanks for the reply.

Yes, been a bit busy here - the financial year ends here on 5th April and so its panic time to try and get all the sites on the air!

<-- No worries, our FY ends tomorrow (March 31st!).

Thanks for all the info in your email - I'm still a little unsure of a couple of things so please bear with me ....

I can edit the crontab as you suggest but how do I control App_rpt from the crontab? What do I put as the command line to make Asterisk play out the file? I assume I have to use root's crontab?

<-- Yes, root's crontab; here's an example of how I played out my ID file at 15 and 45 mins past the hour: 15,45 * * * * /usr/sbin/asterisk -rx "rpt localplay 2182 /path/file_name" Note (once again) file must be in .ulaw format

In your dialplan example, I see the extension referred to is 96 - is that the DTMF code I dial to activate that script or do I need to put something in rpt.conf to call to the dialplan?

<-- Sorry, I think I slipped up earlier, just add (for example) the following to rpt.conf - in the functions stanza: 96=localplay,rpt/current_wx (Note that in the above example, my current_wx file is located in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/rpt/) - you can obviously specify your own path to suit.

You say you can call the playback command from the cron and / or the dialplan - how does one do this and what DTMF code or other trigger can be used to call the playback command?

<-- See above...

Thanks again for your help Ramesh and sorry for the (still) noob questions! Still trying to get my head around how app_rpt and Asterisk stitch together!

<-- No problem Matt; I'm just passing on some stuff that I've acquired from the guys here who have been willing to share and mentor... so I'm giving something back ;).