Best way of spawning and monitoring processes?

I'm going to be building an app that spawns three system processes (Linux). They will run for an estimates 2-8 minutes, and th开发者_开发百科en finish their work and exit. Pretty standard.

I'm wondering the best way of:

• Spawning the processes
• Logging their output
• Performing an action when the process has finished its work

Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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If you have the extension, use the PCNTL functions. They abstract you from getting the process ids, checking their status and so.

• pcntl_exec to start the process
• pcntl_waitpid with WNOHANG option to poll their current status
• To log the output, append > /tmp/somefile 2>&1 to their command. use a different temporary filename for each process - you could generate it with tempnam()