I’m currently working with an existing application that defines a couple constants on the login of a user. For example, if Alice logs in SOME_CONSTANT is defined as 1, while if Bob logs in SOME_CONSTANT is defined as 2. Now I’m trying to write a script that will do a couple of things as if it were Alice and a couple things as if it were Bob. By “as if it were” I mean that SOME_CONSTANT is defined one way for one iteration and another way for the next iteration. Unfortunately, constants are not the best at switching values and refactoring the application to change these from being constants is not an option at this time.
One method I had considered was to use pcntl_fork(). I would fork before the time the constants were defined and run a separate process for each constant. However, I would like this script to be able to run on Windows as well as Linux. At the moment the pcntl extension is not directly supported for Windows. And I’m going to try to avoid getting everything working through Cygwin if I can help it.
Another method I had considered was having the script call children scripts using exec("php childscript.php constant_value"). Will this method allow one child script to define a constant one way and another child script define it another way? I think it should, but I haven’t tested it yet. Also, is there any other major problems anyone can see with this method?
Is there another method I haven’t considered that would be a better choice? Thank you for your time.
The method of using
exec()to call the PHP child script appears to work fine.