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

Use a named fifo.

#!/bin/sh
mkfifo trigger
while true; do
    read < trigger
    long_running_task
done

Then whenever you want to start the long running task, simply write a newline (nonblocking to the trigger file.

As long as your input is smaller than PIPE_BUF and it's a single write() operation, you can write arguments into the fifo and have them show up as $REPLY in the script.