exec() with timeout

Question

I\'m looking for a way to run a PHP process with a timeout. Currently I\'m simply using exec(), but it does not provide a timeout option.

What I also tried is openin

Answer 1

(Disclaimer: I was surprised to find no good solution for this, then I browsed the proc documentation and found it pretty straight forward. So here is a simple proc answer, that uses native functions in a way that provides consistent results. You can also still catch the output for logging purposes.)

The proc line of functions has proc_terminate ( process-handler ), which combined with proc_get_status ( process-handler ) getting the "running" key, you can while loop with sleep to do a synchronous exec call with a timeout.

So basically:

$ps = popen('cmd');
$timeout = 5; //5 seconds
$starttime = time();
while(time() < $starttime + $timeout) //until the current time is greater than our start time, plus the timeout
{
    $status = proc_get_status($ps);
    if($status['running'])
        sleep(1);
    else
        return true; //command completed :)
}

proc_terminate($ps);
return false; //command timed out :(