Separating things to get done

Anon

Is there a way in PHP to have a script tell the server to do something and then go on with what it's doing without waiting for the server to finish? i.e., if I have a script email.php which sends email, and I want to tell the server to send the email, but I want the page to continue while the server emails the email, how would I do this?

--Jason

toma42

The best way would be to cron an email script and just cue up the email. cron the script for every 10-20 seconds and it'll work as you've described above.

Anon

Is there a way to make that work for windows? The program that I'm writing that needs this needs to work under both windows and *nix...

--Jason

toma42

windows cron = at

Anon

"windows cron = at"

Huh? What do you mean?

--Jason

toma42

Did you even try to figure this out or are you intentionally wasting my time???

at.exe
look it up.

Anon

Oh, I didn't know what you were talking about. I don't know about that program, so seeing "windows cron = at" (which looks something like gibberish if you don't know what "at" is since at is a preposition in the english language) I thought that you might have mistyped your message or something.

--Jason

gid__

If you have php compiled/installed in cgi aka command line mode, then you can launch a php command line program from a php web page.

system("php -q email.php");

in unix you can put an & after the command and direct all input to /dev/null, but I'm not sure how you can detache a process under windows....

maybe run it through rundll32.exe or something? I'm not sure...

toma42

http://cvs.php.net/cvs.php/php4/pear/CMD.php

is a pear script to branch processes. Not sure if it works in windows but it looks like a great way to do it if it does.