Asynchronous shell exec in PHP
I've got a PHP script that needs to invoke a shell script but doesn't care at all about the output. The shell script makes a number of SOAP calls and is slow to complete, so I don't want to slow down the PHP request while it waits for a reply. In fact, the PHP request should be able to exit without terminating the shell process.
I've looked into the various exec(), shell_exec(), pcntl_fork(), etc. functions, but none of them seem to offer exactly what I want. (Or, if they do, it's not clear to me how.) Any suggestions?
Answer
If it "doesn't care about the output", couldn't the exec to the script be called with the & to background the process?
EDIT - incorporating what @AdamTheHut commented to this post, you can add this to a call to exec:
" > /dev/null 2>/dev/null &"
That will redirect both stdio (first >) and stderr (2>) to /dev/null and run in the background.
There are other ways to do the same thing, but this is the simplest to read.
An alternative to the above double-redirect:
" &> /dev/null &"