Posted by a on 01/18/06 23:59

Hi everybody,

I have a form that is processed by a php script. When the user presses
Submit, the php script calls exec to start an external process that may take
from seconds to minutes to complete, and in the meantime I would like to
show the user some feedback as to the progress of the operation.

One problem is that exec is synchronous - how do I start an external process
asynchronously? The second issue is that even if I start a process
asynchronously, I don't know how to send a page to the browser without
exiting the script. For example, while waiting for the external process to
finish its work, I would be in a loop, and every X seconds I would update
the page with some new information, but I'm not sure how to do that.

I have php 5.2.2 and Apache 2 on Win XP Pro.

I would appreciate any hints.

A

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