fork from php or perl

yerman

Hello everyone.

I've a perl application which has run time of several hours.
Till now I launch it from a ms-dos windows with output on file.
Now I'm trying to insert in in a web contest, using a submit in a php form that call a system with the launch of the perl script.

from php code:

$command="perl $dir\proof.pl";
system($command);

The system is syncronous, and then it blocks the browser window till the end of execution. Impossible.
I've tried with the forks both in php and in perl, but it seems that anyway the father process waits for the completion of the child.
Maybe I did something wrong.
Has anyone suggestions?

Thank you very much.

gero

matto

under linux/unix you can use the ampersand in the command in order to put the thread into the background.
under windows I don't know how to do this.

yerman

ThankU,
but unfortunately it runs under windows XP.

dalecosp

The PHP CLI wouldn't care about such things. It could be (but no guarantees) that you could have the web page call the system's PHP CLI and have it call the PERL script, but I dunno. I'd have to play around with it, and I've too much going on right now....

AstroTeg

Check out [man]popen[/man] and [man]pclose[/man]. I use this to execute a 15 minute long PHP script from a web page without forcing the user to wait all 15 minutes. Upon submitting, I let the user know they'll get an email (the output from the long running script) in 15 minutes or so. And when that page is generated, I call popen/pclose. It works great for what I need.