scheduled emailing of index files

I’m trying to move from MT to WP. Because MT outputs static files, I’m able to set up something in cron to email a daily index to my listserv at a set time each day. The statement looks like this in cron:
/usr/sbin/sendmail [email protected] </path/to/index_daily.html
I also have this statement for listserv subscribers that prefer text emails…
/usr/sbin/sendmail [email protected] </path/to/index_daily_text.html
The former emails https://www.ems.org/rls/index_daily.html to my HTML subscribers; the latter emails https://www.ems.org/rls/index_daily_text.html to my plain text subscribers. This has worked great for several months. But now I want to do it with PHP files and it doesn’t work, because the file that gets emailed to my listserv isn’t “executed” in the way a php file needs to be. This obviously wasn’t a problem with the static html pages. So I’m wondering if there’s a way I can write something for cron so that the php file gets executed and the result then gets emailed to my list. Any ideas how I might do this? Any alternative that would get me the same result — daily scheduled emailing (at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, in this case) of my index to my listserv? Is there a PHP script that will do this? Thanks in advance…