Question

How can I spawn a process in a PHP page in order to start a program that survives the execution time of the request?

In other words, I want the page to have a normal lifetime (few milliseconds) but launch a program that keeps running on the server. Thanks

Answer 1

Use this code:

<?php exec('nohup /usr/bin/my-command > /dev/null 2>&1 &'); ?>

This forks the sub-process into the background and writes all of the output into /dev/null. That way PHP continues executing the script as if there won’t be any output it has to wait for.