Re: Suggestion on executing external programs from within php

John Clegg wrote:

I have finally had a chance to test your suggestion and I am still getting a browser timeout ? The 1st program runs to completion even though the broswer times out. So it doesn't execute the second program :-( I have also tried.... /usr/local/bin/process_file file1 & exec('/usr/local/bin/process_file file1 &') Any ideas??

Yup. Having checked the system function in the manual (http://php.net/system), it says this... "Note: If you start a program using this function and want to leave it running in the background, you have to make sure that the output of that program is redirected to a file or some other output stream or else PHP will hang until the execution of the program ends." So try this... system('/usr/local/bin/process_file file1 > /dev/null &'); system('/usr/local/bin/process_file file2 > /dev/null &'); -- Stuart