Posted by Colin McKinnon on 08/29/05 22:49

ZeldorBlat wrote:

>>From http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
>
> "Note: 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."

Won't work - you haven't dissocciated the new process from the parent.
(Might work on a non-unix system). The webserver won't send an EOF until
the chid process terminates. You could call it from a function registered
using register_shutdown_function() to run after the socket is closed but
that's still messy as the the webserver process hangs around to wait for it
to exit.

You can create a separate process group easily using the 'at' command.

$run_in_background=`echo $name_of_script | at now`;

Chris wrote:

> Is it possible to close an HTTP connection in the middle of a php
> script?

If the above didn't answer your question (there are instances where you
might want to disconnect from the browser but continue with the current
thread of execution) then repost - there's an answer to this as well, but
it really starts getting complicated and you need to start working with
proxy scripts and sockets.

C.

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