calling a program to run on a server

TravisB

I would like to know how I can call a program to run on the server from a web page. We are trying to create a notification program that can send emails and text messages to someone when a high priority call is created.

Once the high priority ticktet is created online, we want to send alerts every 5 minutes until someone accepts the call. We do not want the notification to be dependant on someone running a PHP script on the website because it will stop running if the browser is closed.

How can we have a PHP script on the website call a program on the server that can be run after the browser is closed? Does anyone know of any software that might already do what I described above?

Thanks,
Travis

saraadmin

Could you use CGI? Write you program to handle sending SMS messages in (perl/C/Python/whatever) and start it using PHP's include() function.

You can use HTTP includes:

include ("http://domain.net/cgi-bin/start-notify.pl$ticketinfo");

TravisB

That is a good idea. Does anyone have any suggestions on software that can do this that is already developed?

Plasma

you could use shell() (or system()) to spawn a php process to wget the page and redirect its output to /dev/null to not save it anywhere (but the script is still ran).

Here's an example:

wget http://www.google.com/script.php --delete-after -q -b -o /dev/null

Have wget 'GET' the page, and delete its returned output instead of saving it.