f**king problems (jk..forking) :) --please help

[lazyelm]

i am forking a call to another php script becuase it must connect to a mail server. It can take up to a minute to send depending on attachments and network traffic and other factors.

here is the code i am using to call the scrip that does the email functions

exec("start c:\\php\\php d:\\web_projects\\ltrak\\wwwroot\forked.php > NUL &"); 

When i call the script this way, it still waits for the exec to return so it does not speed anything up. I thought forking was meant to start a new process so that the current one can continue on with what it is doing.

Any ideas?

platform is win2k pro php 4.3.3 iis5

[Merve]

Taken from php.net:

Note: If you start a program using this function and want to leave it running in the background, you have to make sure that the output of that program is redirected to a file or some other output stream or else PHP will hang until the execution of the program ends.

[lazyelm]

yep... in windows the > NUL is the equivalent of redirecting to dev/null on unix

i have also tried to output to a file, but with same results

[Weedpacket]

Windows doesn't use & to indicate that a command should be run as a background task. Windows uses it to separate multiple commands on a single line.

I think there are a couple of switches (start /? for details) that might have a suitable effect.