Closing browser on a long-running PHP script

nevvermind

Some other guy asked this on a local PHP forum and I find it terribly interesting (I think :rolleyes🙂. I'll translated roughly (what I understood):

that guy wrote:
Does anyone know how to make a PHP script that doesn't keep a browser occupied when running a rather long time [the PHP script]?
I want to scan a site (for site-mapping). When I press the "Scan" button, the script starts running via an AJAX start-command, which can run as long as a day [the PHP script]. While the script is running, if I don't close the browser, I can't access that website. If I restart my browser (I'm using ignore_user_abort(true) ), there's no problem. Can something be done so that the browser shouldn't wait? [<-- don't understand this question]

Bah, I don't want to help him unless I get quite a grip of his situation. Why is that happening (the underlying HTTP requests)? I mean, the blocked website if script runs and all.

dagon

i do it quite often just call a script on the command line with exec()

sneakyimp

I'm not certain, but I believe that your browser will stay connected until your [man]exec[/man] command completes its business. In linux, if you follow your command with an an ampersand, that will cause the command to be executed 'in the background' and exec can return immediately. If you want to get output from the command, you'll have to concoct some way to find out what it's doing.

dagon

sneakyimp;10963179 wrote:
I'm not certain, but I believe that your browser will stay connected until your [man]exec[/man] command completes its business

no it wont. << sorry i need to qualify that

If a program is started with this function, in order for it to continue running in the background, the output of the program must be redirected to a file or another output stream. Failing to do so will cause PHP to hang until the execution of the program ends.

what i always do is something like

exec("nohup php file.php  >/dev/null 2>&1 &");