executing a program?

[Jezza]

Hey i'd like to execute a program, such as a server using PHP, BUT i need it to execute the program and not wait for it to exit? How would i do that?

 

Running ubuntu (linux) lampp (xampp)

[oni-kun]

I'm not sure what you mean. If you're meaning to execute an executable and output it in PHP you'd use something like this.. forgot the exact code..

 

$cal = @exec('cal');
echo '<pre>The date is:';
echo $cal;
echo '</pre>'

[Jezza]

Well if you were to exec something with php, the page would only finish loading AFTER the thing it executed stopped...

I want to exec something with php, the page would load even if the thing hasn't stopped yet...

[trq]

Then you need to put your program into the background just as you would from within the shell.

 

system('foo &');

[Jezza]

That made absolutely no sense to me and just looking at it makes my head hurt, and it also looks like it outputs the result i don't want that, i pretty much want to simulate double clicking on a program, it opens up like that and doesn't wait for the program to finish up before it continues.

[trq]

I don't click to run programs under Linux, a desktop is just a wrapper. Within the shell, & puts a program into the background. In my example, foo was en example program. Could just as easily have been....

 

exec('someprogram &');

[Jezza]

but when i do that, sure the application would start, but so long as the application is running the pages won't load, i don't want that

[trq]

If you trying to initialize a server as you siad, you should do it through a startup script. Take a look in your /etc/init.d directory for examples if there isn't already a script written for the server you are starting.

 

Then you would simply....

 

exec('/etc/init.d/nameofservice start');

 

and it will take care of putting the process into the background. Otherwise, the examples I have shown you should work.