Writing a daemon in PHP

[Anon]

Hi,

Recently I started using PHP as a shell scripting language (and not only as a web scripting language). For an application I'm developing at work I needed to write some sort of daemon - a program that constantly runs in the background and executes a certain action at a given date/time. I know I could do that with a cronjob, but I previously noticed that cron daemons sometimes hang and stuff...

Anyway, I started searching the archives here and found that PHP does not support fork(). Well, I wanted to point out that there's another method of writing some sort of daemon. You can write your program in an endless loop, like:

while (1) {
<do something>
sleep (30);
}

And then launching your shell script with

nohup php -q -f <yourscript>.php

That will execute the script and keep it running, even if you log off.

I hope that provides a valuable alternative for those who wanted to write some sort of daemon and couldn't find how...

Ciao !

Sven Delmeiren
E-Zone Internet Solutions

[noremac]

I take it, your doing this with a Unix based OS (Linux,FreeBSD,etc..)

I've got a friend whose been trying to the same on a windows box...

[Anon]

Hi,

Indeed, this only works on a Unix based operating system, as "nohup" is not a valid command on WinNT/2000. I suppose getting something like this to run on a Windows box would involve starting it as a service.

Regards,

Sven