Can PHP find *Nix process numbers?

Vigilante

What I'm trying to do is write management tools for SHOUTcast servers. Among other things, the script needs to be able to kill specific servers, I intend to do this with shell_exec("kill -TERM [PID]" ) where [PID] is the process number you can see if you make a ps X from a shell session.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do this in php or if php can do this at all. Any ideas?

superwormy

Coudl you do an ls | grep name_of_program and parse out the results to get PID?

use system() or exec()... whichever one returns the resutls I forget...

Vigilante

I'll try, but does grep run programs from the current working directory?

I mean, if the script was run from public_html somewhere would I need to cd to the proper directory and use grep? I ask because there would be some 20 instances of the same program running at any time and I want to be able to kill ones in specific directories.

superwormy

grep doesn't run programs at all, its a pattern matching thing, you can essentially regex the stout of a program no the command line.

The program 'ls' on the command line lists programs running under the current user, you can do ls -ax to get all programs running. 'grep' would allow you to filter for the program names you want to actually deal with.

You could only tell which programs were in which directories if you got the PIDs right away, when the program first started running, and kept track of that somehow. So after each program starts, records the new PID you got from the ls -ax grep program_name

Then you would know which programs were running where, etc.

Then you could match up teh PIDs and deal with them by PID.

If that made sense...

LordShryku

I did this with shell_exec(), using ps -aef|grep $programName

superwormy

You shoudl also look at the Process Control Functions section of the manual under Function REference. It sounds very much llike what you're looking to do...

Vigilante

I looked over the Process Control Functions but didn't see anything related to identifying running processes and shutting down one or another instances of the same program. This will also be run in a webserver environment (which the Process Control Function page recommends against) although I never really thought php would be good for any other type of environment.

Looks like I'll have to do some testing with
ps -aef|grep $programName

But what I don't see is how this command will distinguish between 20 something instances of shoutcast running. I need to identify the PID from a process in any given directory so it can be killed with a button.

The program 'ls' on the command line lists programs running under the current user, you can do ls -ax to get all programs running. 'grep' would allow you to filter for the program names you want to actually deal with.

So what might work is to execute the command "ls -ax" and then extract the IDs from the output? That might not be too difficult I'll have to examine the output, I don't have as much experience with unix as I would like. Can you give me an example on the actual command you would use with grep or is that "ls | grep name_of_program". Sorry if my questions demonstrate a pitiful lack of knowledge but my command line experience is limited to good old dos.

I'm still looking into this but if anyone can suggest anything I would appreciate it.

superwormy

Exact syntax:

ps -ax | grep name_of_program

The only way you're going to be able to tell them apart is to be able to communicate with the program OR if you open the program with some kinda command string... if you had done:

name_of_program -directory /path/to/directory/we/are/in/

Never used Shoutcast so I'm not sure what the server is like...