Is there a way to use shell_exec without waiting f

Question

I have a process intensive task that I would like to run in the background.

The user clicks on a page, the PHP script runs, and finally, based on some conditions, if required, then it has to run a shell script, E.G.:

shell_exec('php measurePerformance.php 47 844 [e-mail]');

Currently I use shell_exec, but this requires the script to wait for an output. Is there any way to execute the command I want without waiting for it to complete?

Answer 1

How about adding.

"> /dev/null 2>/dev/null &"

shell_exec('php measurePerformance.php 47 844 [e-mail] > /dev/null 2>/dev/null &');

Note this also gets rid of the stdio and stderr.

Answer 2

This will execute a command and disconnect from the running process. Of course, it can be any command you want. But for a test, you can create a php file with a sleep(20) command it.

exec("nohup /usr/bin/php -f sleep.php > /dev/null 2>&1 &");

Answer 3

If it's off of a web page, I recommend generating a signal of some kind (dropping a file in a directory, perhaps) and having a cron job pick up the work that needs to be done. Otherwise, we're likely to get into the territory of using pcntl_fork() and exec() from inside an Apache process, and that's just bad mojo.

Answer 4

Use PHP's popen command, e.g.:

pclose(popen("start c:\wamp\bin\php.exe c:\wamp\www\script.php","r"));

This will create a child process and the script will excute in the background without waiting for output.

Answer 5

That will work but you will have to be careful not to overload your server because it will create a new process every time you call this function which will run in background. If only one concurrent call at the same time then this workaround will do the job.

If not then I would advice to run a message queue like for instance beanstalkd/gearman/amazon sqs.

Answer 6

You could always post over some AJAX to a page that calls the shell_exec().