passthru() help

[the_jaymz]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the forum and to PHP. I have some pretty good experience writing shell scripts, but beyond that, I'm not much of a programmer. That being said, here's what I'm trying to do:

I'm using the passthru() function to run a program on the server. The server side program can take a few minutes to finish, but it does send data to stdout as it's running. While it's running, I'd like to give the user some sort of indication that the program is running. A progress bar would be fine, but I'd really like to be able to give them the output of the server side program as it becomes available.

So far, I haven't seen that there's a way to do this with passthru(). Should I try a different function? Is this even possible with PHP?

Thanks for your help.