starting process in the background

kostja

Greetings!

Maybe someone can help me with that problem?
I wrote a PHP script which takes about 15 minutes to complete. Now I want a second PHP-Script to start the other script running in the background.

I tried something like

exec("/usr/bin/lynx http://www.mypage.com/myscript.php > /dev/null");

but it doesn't work at all (nothing happens).

Thanks for your ideas on how to solve this!

Kostja

[deleted]

If you take out the "> /dev/null" you may get some more info about what is failing.

Also, try using the CGI version of PHP, because the method you use now will use webserver's resources also.

Anon

i have heard that you have to have a :

#!/bin/user/php

on the first line

not sure about that tho

kostja

Hi,

Unfortunately I'm working with mod_php, so there's no executable named php :-(

Kostja

kostja

Hi,

thanks for your idea but leaving out "> /dev/null" doesn't help. My script doesn't produce any sort of output either.

I wrote " > /dev/null" because in the PHP documentation it says

"Note also that if you start a program using this function and want to leave it running in the background, you have to make sure that the output of that program is redirected to a file or some other output stream or else PHP will hang until the execution of the program ends."

Did I understand something wrong?

Kostja

[deleted]

Indeed, that's Unix's way of linking the script to an executable.
This is only for scripts that need to be executed by a binary though.

kparker

The command line you pass to exec() also needs to end in "&"; otherwise the calling program waits until it completes.