starting a process in the "background"??

mrbippy

I have an online application that generates some very large reports (1.5Meg +) in RTF format.

When a user requests one of these reports I would like it to start generating the report in the background, allowing the user to continue working in other areas of the site or shut down thier browser and go do something else entirely.

Then once the report is complete, either popup a message, if the browser and session still exist or send an email notifying the user that their report is ready.

I am aware of pnctl_fork() but it is not an option for me.

If you have any ideas I would really like to hear them.

Thanks
mrbippy

ednark

what about just executing the script from the command line...

see [man]exec/man and [man]escapeshellarg/man or [man]escapeshellcmd/man ... it seems you can have it run on its own after the page has finished executing if you redirect the output of the script to a file or dev/null or something....

if its a php script... there are some flags i don't know offhand that you set php with so it knows its running commandline...

popoup:

you could store an 'awaiting_file' session vairable for the user...

each page load could check for the existance of the file, and set a javascript popupbox upon completion and could send an email telling the user their file is complete

mrbippy

ednark,

Thanks for the quick response...

I have tried using...

exec("genreport.php > $report.txt 2>&1 &");

...but I get nothing back. Not sure why.

mrbippy

ednark

try specifying the executable directly

/usr/lib/php -q

c:\php\php.exe -q

and

-q leaves out http headers from the output... which you want

try that... the manual has more about commandline processing... better known as Chapter 8

mrbippy

Ok,

Now that I have (I think) a process running in the background.
How do I get the results the php file that ran produced?

The online manual's chapters are screwed up but I found information here "Program Execution functions" on starting the background process but nothing on get the results.