Slow external execution!

Anon

I am trying to execute grep from php and print out the result. Normally in perl, I would do this:

open (SEARCH, "grep stuff *.html |");
while ($line = <SEARCH>) {
print $line;
}
close (SEARCH);

In PHP, I did this:
$fp = popen ("grep stuff *.html", "r");
while (!feof ($fp)) {
$buffer = fgets($fp, 4096);
echo $buffer;
}
pclose ($fp);

Both worked, except the perl version took less than 1 second to complete, while the PHP version took 30 seconds to complete. What did I do wrong?

brandonschnell

echo grep stuff *.html;

note, those are backticks around the command prompt string.

Anon

I tried that, same result. The strange thing is, if I run that statement at command line (i.e. run php.exe, then manually enter <?php echo `grep... ?>), execution is very fast. But if the same script is called as a result of a POST method, it takes too long until the script aborts execution.

I am using Win2K + Apache 1.3.20 with mod_php 4.05. Is there anything in php.ini that I can tweak to improve execution time?

brandonschnell

1) try GET.

2) does it occur with any command or just the grep?

3) if you echo something before the grep does it show up right away then hang for the grep? may be an issue where apache isn't returning the results right away.

4) may be a windows issue. i'd try the exec() & system() functions and see if you have better luck with them.

Anon

Yeah, something is wrong with either Win32 Grep or Win32 Apache. I tried the same code on a Linux machine and there's no speed problem.

On my Win32/Apache/Grep, even when I issue grep --help, it takes forever to show the result.

Oh well, thanks for your help anyway.