system/shell/exec/etc. not running command correctly

mortrek

Hello.

I've got PHP 5.1.6, Apache 2.2.2, on Fedora 5. Everything is great except that when I use an of the external launching commands, persistent apps dont stay open.

I have a simple shell script set up to load an app, and I have it write a PID file. Immediately after calling exec (milliseconds later) the PID is alive. However, within a few more milliseconds it seems to close.

I've made sure that the apache uid/gid have full access to the script and the apps it calls.
When sudo'ing manualy in a shell with the apache uid, the script works flawlessly and loads the program, and stays open, as it should. I've verified that the app loads under the uid 'apache' with ps.
When running it through PHP, it seems to close almost immediately after succeeding.

Is there some fundamental issue with how this works that I'm missing?
I can't seem to get any real errors out of php, apache, or even the shell when redirected to a file.

Should I try PHP4? Is PHP5 buggy with this kind of thing? I even tried running 'at' to schedule the script (so that it'd be invoked by at instead of the shell itself) but that failed, silently, as well..

Thanks for any help you can provide me.

NogDog

Perhaps you need to launch them in background mode?

shell_exec('/home/username/scripts/example.sh [color=red][b]&[/b][/color]');

mortrek

Unfortunately I've already tried that to no effect. Thanks for the suggestion though.

mortrek

I found the problem after much frustration...
It appears that you must use the full path for just about everything in the script when running as apache. I was using some bin files that were in normal enough places (/usr/local/bin) but when apache ran a command, it apparently did not have the path var set up to search there.

Its all running well now.
Thanks

mortrek

Actually, let me be more specific on what occurred.
I was running an app using Screen to launch/disconnect from it. Screen would load properly, but the app would not. Upon changing the script so that it ran directly (not using screen) it still would not work.
Changing my script to use absolute paths for all programs alone did not fix the issue. However, what I did was I ran the script using "at script.sh now" which would use at to do the actual application launching. Combined with the absolute paths, using 'at' as a sort of launching daemon allowed my project to work as intended.

Now, I still don't know how to launch my script directly so that the app it launches stays alive, but that isn't a problem anymore. Using 'at' works fine for my needs.

Thanks