[RESOLVED] Progress Bar for a system call?

stry_cat

I posted this on another site, didn't get any replies and realized I should have just poested it here to start with. If you've already seen this question, I'm sorry.

In one part of my script, I take an uploaded image and convert it to another format. I'm doing this with this:

exec("convert -verbose " . $_FILES['imgfile']['tmp_name'] . " -resize 200x300 /tmp/" . $thumbname, $arrayOutput);

Now since some of the images can be really big and this conversion sometimes takes a while, I'd like to send some info to the browser to let the user know the image is being processed.

In other parts of my script, I just call ob_flush and flush to send the output to the browser. However until the whole cmd is finished, I can't seem to access $arrayOutput to print out the progress.

Is there some way I can do this? I'd even settle for just sending to the browser some generic "Converting ..." and follow it with more "." every second or two.

About 90% of the uploaded images multipage tiffs. Therefore I can't use the gd functions, which would make this a lot simpler.

Thanks

nemonoman

Easiest is to use a javascript based progress bar, example

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/xpprogressbar.htm

Getting the page logic to work can be sort of tricky.

You submit the values to the server and flush display the progress bar page. Using either a HEADER function or a javascript LOCATION function, you immediately redirect to the "I'm finished processing page". The progress bar page will then stay resident until the server is finished processing.

stry_cat

What a neat idea. Thanks!

I think all I need to do is something like this:

$display_block1 = "code for the JavaScript progress bar";
$display_block2 = "code to turn off the bar";
echo $display_block;
ob_flush();
flush();
system($cmd)
echo $display_block2;
ob_flush();
flush();

If this works it will be really cool. Thanks again!

Edit: If it does work I'll mark this thread as Resolved. Otherwise I'll be back asking questions