passing resources from one script to another

Hi All, I'm developing a small server application that accepts connections on a socket and then launches an interactive session with the client. The server needs to be able to accept N connections. This part is working famously thanks to code I've borrowed and modified from: http://www.zend.com/lists/php-dev/200205/msg00286.html The problem is the dialogue with the client. If I enter into a while loop then the whole script remains occupied and cannot accept new connections. If I try to open a new background process with exec, then I need to pass a resource from the listening script to the dialogue script. However, it seems that I cannot pass a resource between scripts. If I serialize the resource, passing it as a string to the dialogue shell script, then unserialize it in the dialogue script, it's no longer a resource but an integer... Any ideas on how to get around this problem? Can it be done with PHP? Ian