PHP using proc_open so that it doesn't wait for the script it opens (runs) to finish?

Question

I've spent a while on this but can't get this to work, I apologize as I asked a somewhat related question about this earlier but deleted it so I could do more research to narrow down the question, at this point I am stuck as I thought I had the solution with this but its not working as I expect.. I found a forum where someone asked a similar question and they gave code like below, which I am trying.. it does run the script, but it still waits for it to finish before going to the next line in the PHP code

    proc_close(proc_open ("/var/www/other_scripts/perl/apps/emails_extract_from_url.pl \"$stoopid\"", array(), $foo));

Answer 1

Hey i've been using proc_open alot lately and it never waits for it to finish before moving on. Make sure you specify the pipes and not just use an empty array()

$descriptorspec = array(
   0 => array("pipe", "r"),  // stdin is a pipe that the child will read from
   1 => array("pipe", "w"),  // stdout is a pipe that the child will write to
   2 => array("file", "/tmp/error-output.txt", "a") // stderr is a file to write to
);

and also assign proc_open to a variable.

$myProc = proc_open("/var/www/other_scripts/perl/apps/emails_extract_from_url.pl \"$stoopid\"", $descriptorspec , $foo)

You can then get the status of your process by using proc_get_status($myProc);

More information here http://au.php.net/proc_open

More Information on closing.

$temp = fgets($this->open_pipes[$thread_id][1], 1024);
if($this->checkFinishedThread($thread_id))
{
    fclose($this->open_pipes[$thread_id][1]);
    proc_close($thread);
}

function checkFinishedThread($thread_id)
{
    $test = stream_get_meta_data($this->open_pipes[$thread_id][1]);
    if($test['eof'] == 1)
        return true;
    return false;
}