pcntl not working on Ubuntu 'for security reasons'

Question

I have installed pcntl on my PHP 5.4.6 running on Ubuntu 32-bit 12.10, using this article.

It didn\'t go smoothly at all because after compiling, when running make

Answer 1

I too had this problem. Ubuntu ships with some sample PHP configuration files in /usr/share/php5: php.ini-production is the template for the Apache web server PHP config (/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) and it disables pcntl_fork and other functions. php.ini-production.cli is the template for PHP run from the command line (/etc/php5/cli/php.ini) including when you're running tests, and it doesn't disable any functions. But somehow my /etc/php5/cli/php.ini was a copy of the Apache config which disables these functions.

I'm not sure how this happened. I installed my LAMP stack with Ubuntu 12.04. My /etc/php5/cli/php.ini file dated from October 2013, suggesting Ubuntu 13.10 set it up; maybe that release copied the wrong file. Ubuntu upgrades update the sample files in /usr/share/php5 but leave the files in /etc/ alone.

To fix it I used

$ sudo cp -pi /usr/share/php5/php.ini-production.cli /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

to copy the default command-line settings file. Obviously if you've made changes to the command-line PHP5 settings, this will overwrite them; use your UNIX skills to diff and merge them.