How to asynchronous shell exec in PHP

Question

I've got a PHP script that needs to invoke a shell script but doesn't care at all about the output. The shell script makes a number of SOAP calls and is slow to complete, so I don't want to slow down the PHP request while it waits for a reply. In fact, the PHP request should be able to exit without terminating the shell process.

I've looked into the various exec(), shell_exec(), pcntl_fork(), etc. functions, but none of them seem to offer exactly what I want. (Or, if they do, it's not clear to me how.) Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

good way to run an asynchronous PHP script (actually it works with almost everything).

It's based on popen() and pclose() commands. And works well both on Windows and Unix.

function execInBackground($cmd) {
    if (substr(php_uname(), 0, 7) == "Windows"){
        pclose(popen("start /B ". $cmd, "r")); 
    }
    else {
        exec($cmd . " > /dev/null &");  
    }
} 

Hope it helps!!

Thank you!!