is there a way to launch a php script and get the status?

is it possible to launch a php script in background on the webserver with js and let it run even if you change page or not visit the site at all and then get the current status if you call the php script in a second moment?

This php script will process data for hours and sleep for X seconds/minutes for each loops. If what I asked before is possible how can I even get "echos" from it if php will only generated an output only when the script ends?

Maybe this is not a job for PHP?

thank you

EDIT: on a 开发者_Go百科windows machine with apache

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It certainly is possible - I have several scripts that run 24/7 written in PHP. Check out Creating Daemons in PHP. It has good info on how to 'daemonize' a php script so that it will run like a service, and it also covers signal handling.

To get debugging output you would redirect to a log file. Do a search on "unix redirect output" as there is a lot of info available.

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In Windows it's not much different from UNIX.

First of all, you need to create a PHP script with a run loop. For example, take a look at this: http://code.google.com/p/php-apns/ . This is a PHP "daemon": the main script, PushMonitor.php, runs forever, because it has an infinite loop. It polls a queue at regular intervals, then execute the actions and then wait. Really simple, actually!

The problem, in your case, is that you want to launch the "daemon" from a PHP script. You may want to look at this: http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2006/09/14/asynchronous-processing-with-php/ (first example code) . You will execute something like launchBackgroundProcess('php myscript.php') .

Note that on the code there's the "start /b" command (and the "&" at the end of the command for UNIX). That is important, because otherwise your process would be killed when the PHP script of the web page is terminated (children process die after parent dies!). Also, remember that the "php" executable (cli) must be in your path (so you can execute "php" from the command line).

Since the PHP script of the page launching the background process is going to terminate, you can't directly catch the "echoes" in a simple way. My suggestion is to write all output to a file (or a database etc), and then read the contents from that source when necessary. So, instead of "echo", you will use file_put_contents() etc.