PHP system call followed by a Perl system call

georgequestion

I have a php script which calls a perl script with the system() function.
The perl script itself has system() function in it.

The perl system call is not working.

However, the perl script works when I use it from the commandline.

Am I asking php to do something it can not do?

Thank you,

George

bradgrafelman

Is there any reason you can't move the second system() call into the PHP script?

georgequestion

Basically the perl scripts were all written before the thought to move them to a browser became an issue. Alot of recoding would be needed to move it to php. I'm wondering if turning the perl script into some sort of cgi script would solve the problem, but I don't know what that would entail yet.

Thanks

George

kburger

A few thoughts, maybe none helpful.

Could it be a permissions problem? What I mean is, is the Perl script executable by the user of the webserver?

example:

-rwxr--r-- root root theperlscript.pl

wouldn't be executable by the user 'apache', for example

according to the PHP manual:

string system ( string command [, int &return_var] )

I'm assuming you're assigning this to some variable and echoing it out? According to the manual it'll only give you the last line of output.

The optional second parameter to the system() function will contain the return status code. TRUE on success and FALSE on falure. Try putting a variable there and see what you get.

georgequestion

Thank you for those ideas.

The system return value is 0.

I have gotten both system calls to run now, but the perl system call needs some time to execute and php is not waiting for the process to finish. So I can see that a file has been made and some information is being sent to it, but the "process" is cut short.

(I just to say again that the perl script runs ok from the commadline.)

I have increased the memory_limit and execution time values in php.ini, but that hasn't helped.

Is there another parameter I can change?

Thank you,

George

MikeSnead

You could have the php script sleep long enough for the perl script to complete... maybe...

bradgrafelman

What's the system call look like exactly? perl myfile.pl or something similar?

I'm not a 'nix guru, but I could have sworn you could make processes run in the background (i.e. not cause the parent process to wait for the program to finish) by using an '&', i.e. perl myfile.pl & or something similar. I'm looking into this currently, but try that.

EDIT: Played around on my 'nix server, and found that iI was correct in using the '&'.

Also, if that doesn't work, try using nohup perl myfile.pl (type man nohup for more info).