php execute a background process

Question

I need to execute a directory copy upon a user action, but the directories are quite large, so I would like to be able to perform such an action without the user being aware

Answer 1

If you need to just do something in background without the PHP page waiting for it to complete, you could use another (background) PHP script that is "invoked" with wget command. This background PHP script will be executed with privileges, of course, as any other PHP script on your system.

Here is an example on Windows using wget from gnuwin32 packages.

The background code (file test-proc-bg.php) as an exmple ...

sleep(5);   // some delay
file_put_contents('test.txt', date('Y-m-d/H:i:s.u')); // writes time in a file

The foreground script, the one invoking ...

$proc_command = "wget.exe http://localhost/test-proc-bg.php -q -O - -b";
$proc = popen($proc_command, "r");
pclose($proc);

You must use the popen/pclose for this to work properly.

The wget options:

-q    keeps wget quiet.
-O -  outputs to stdout.
-b    works on background