PHP:passthru keeps waiting for the command to complete

I wanted to execute (in background) a shell script from a PHP program. I wrote the following code for the same:

echo “Starting…”;
passthru(“/path/to/shell/script.sh &”);
echo “…Started”;
?>

But unfortunately, the results were not what I had expected. The PHP script keeps running untill the script.sh exits.

$> php -q try.php
Starting…

Fortunately enough, I found the solution pretty soon. The trick is to redirect the output to /dev/null.

Changing the above code to the following worked for me:

echo “Starting…”;
passthru(“/path/to/shell/script.sh > /dev/null &”);
echo “…Started”;
?>


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Published:
2.16.07 / 7am
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