Is there a way to use shell exec without waiting for the command to complete

Question

I have a process intensive task that I would like to run in the background   The user clicks on a page  the PHP script runs  and finally  based on some conditions  if required  then it has to run a shell script  E G    shell exec  php measurePerformance php 47 844 email yahoo com      Currently I use shell exec  but this requires the script to wait for an output  Is there any way to execute the command I want without waiting for it to complete

User · Answer

Sure  for windows you can use    WshShell   new COM  WScript Shell     oExec    WshShell- gt Run  C  path to php-win exe -f C  path to script php   0  false       Note   If you get a COM error  add the extension to your php ini and restart apache    COM DOT NET  extension php com dotnet dll

User · Answer

On Windows 2003  to call another script without waiting  I used this    commandString    start  b c   php  php EXE C   Inetpub  wwwroot  mysite com  phpforktest php --passmsg  testmsg    pclose popen  commandString   r       This only works AFTER giving changing permissions on cmd exe - add Read and Execute for IUSR YOURMACHINE  I also set write to Deny

User · Answer

You can also give your output back to the client instantly and continue processing your PHP code afterwards   This is the method I am using for long-waiting Ajax calls which would not have any effect on client side   ob end clean    ignore user abort    ob start    header  Connection  close    echo json encode  out   header  Content-Length      ob get length     ob end flush    flush       execute your command here  client will not wait for response  it already has one above    You can find the detailed explanation here  http   oytun co response-now-process-later

User · Answer

This will execute a command and disconnect from the running process  Of course  it can be any command you want  But for a test  you can create a php file with a sleep 20  command it   exec  nohup  usr bin php -f sleep php  gt   dev null 2 gt  amp 1  amp

User · Answer

If it s off of a web page  I recommend generating a signal of some kind  dropping a file in a directory  perhaps  and having a cron job pick up the work that needs to be done   Otherwise  we re likely to get into the territory of using pcntl fork   and exec   from inside an Apache process  and that s just bad mojo

User · Answer

Use PHP s popen command  e g    pclose popen  start c  wamp bin php exe c  wamp www script php   r       This will create a child process and the script will excute in the background without waiting for output

User · Answer

How about adding     gt   dev null 2 gt  dev null  amp    shell exec  php measurePerformance php 47 844 email yahoo com  gt   dev null 2 gt  dev null  amp       Note this also gets rid of the stdio and stderr

User · Answer

That will work but you will have to be careful not to overload your server because it will create a new process every time you call this function which will run in background  If only one concurrent call at the same time then this workaround will do the job   If not then I would advice to run a message queue like for instance beanstalkd gearman amazon sqs

[php] Is there a way to use shell_exec without waiting for the command to complete?

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