Asynchronous shell exec in PHP

Question

I\'ve got a PHP script that needs to invoke a shell script but doesn\'t care at all about the output. The shell script makes a number of SOAP calls and is slow to complete,

Answer 1

If it "doesn't care about the output", couldn't the exec to the script be called with the & to background the process?

EDIT - incorporating what @AdamTheHut commented to this post, you can add this to a call to exec:

" > /dev/null 2>/dev/null &"

That will redirect both stdio (first >) and stderr (2>) to /dev/null and run in the background.

There are other ways to do the same thing, but this is the simplest to read.

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An alternative to the above double-redirect:

" &> /dev/null &"