Question

Is there a way to kill a PHP program while it’s working? I know in Linux/Unix I can do

ps -u [username]

And it will tell me what processes are running. To stop a process I just enter

kill [process #]

With PHP is there any way to see what processes are currently running on the remote server and kill an individual program from completion? Ideally using exec()?

The reason that I ask is that I am on a shared hosting environment and I work on & test my programs directly on the server… Every now and then I’ll do something silly like enter a ridiculous number of loops, accidentally, where it can take several minutes to an hour to actually complete.

Seeing that there is virtually no information on the subject, I thought it would be an interesting question to throw out there.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Ask your hosting provider for SSH access and do that in Unix way. Still you can emulate shell access with a system function and friends:

exec("ps --no-header -eo pid,user,comm", $output);
foreach ($output as $line) {
    $line = preg_split('#\s+#', trim($line));
    echo "PID: $line[0] USER: $line[1] PRG: $line[2]\n";
}

Disclaimer: you probably won’t be able to kill Apache processes even if you will have shell access.