Suppressing output from exec() calls in PHP

Question

I have a number of command line scripts in PHP that use exec() to perform tasks such as restarting services, loading MySQL timezone files, etc. While exec() itself does not

Answer 1

Redirecting stderr alone should not influence where processing takes place, just make sure not to add an &. It should only run in the background if you redirect the output and make it run in the background.

Edit:

Cracked open cygwin, you need to redirect stderr for the first command, give this a try:

$command = 'mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo 2> /dev/null | mysql mysql';
exec($command, $output, $result);