PHP How to Start an External Program Running - Having Trouble With System and Exec

php How do I start an external program running - Having trouble with system and exec

What behavior are you expecting? Calling system('notepad') works fine - it just doesn't display the GUI. It runs in the background, and PHP sits there patiently waiting for notepad to close itself (and only continues if you kill notepad from the process list).

If you're expecting it to pop up a GUI, I'm fairly certain that you can't do that. ;) An option might be to write out a batch script (file_put_contents('runme.bat', 'notepad hello.txt')) and have that batch script queued (with Windows scheduler or whatever the cron-equivalent is on Windows) to run in an async fashion (and clear itself at the end).

How can I execute an external program without php script interrupt

There is a bunch of ways you can achieve this:

Running background process using &:

exec('nohup ./loop.php > loop.out 2>&1 &');

Using pcntl_fork and running your process from child:

 $pid = pcntl_fork();
 switch ($pid){
   case -1:
     die('Fork failed');
     break;
   case 0:
     exec('nohup ./loop.php > loop.out');
     exit();
   default:
     break;
 }
 echo "I'm not really a superman, just a parent process';

There is more ways to do this, just lurk into PHP documentation and questions in php here...

How can I start a Windows GUI program using PHP?

To launch a program on the computer which runs the webserver:

<?php
exec('"C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" "C:\foo.php"');

The above will work on vista/win7 IF the webserver does not run as a windows service. For example, if you run apache and it automatically starts when your computer boots, you probably installed it as a service. You can check to see if apache shows up in the windows services tab/thingy.

If the webserver runs as a service, you'll need to look into enabling the "allow desktop interaction" option for the service. But otherwise:

An easy test using php's new built in webserver(php 5.4+). The key thing here is you manually start the server from a shell, so it runs as your user instead of as a service.

<?php
// C:\my\htdocs\script.php
exec('"C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" "C:\foo.php"');

start a webserver via a command window

C:\path\to\php.exe -S localhost:8000 -t C:\my\htdocs

Then in your browser
http://localhost:8000/script.php

php exec() background process issues

Note:

If a program is started with this function, in order for it to continue running in the background, the output of the program must be redirected to a file or another output stream. Failing to do so will cause PHP to hang until the execution of the program ends.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php

so:

exec("php csv.php $file $user > /dev/null &"); // no $output

Open .exe from php webapp and login

So, in light of the comment/chat we had under your question, using phpseclib, you should be able to connect to the remote machine, which will run your the application:

require_once('Net/SSH2.php');
$ssh = new Net_SSH2('winhostaddress');
//if needed:
if (!$ssh->login('user', 'pass'))
{
    exit('Failed to connect to win');
}
$ssh->exec('C:\\Path\\to\\app.exe argument1 argument2 argument3');

That should do the trick. When using flags, like on *NIX systems: ls -a, you should know that the Windows counterpart is /. Other than that, it's all pretty much the same. escapeshellarg is not to be forgotten, when passing client-data to the executable.

Arguments containing spaces should be delimited using double quotes.

If you're not sure weather or not the application you're launching is accessible to the user you used to connect via ssh, try prepending this to your actual command:

runas /user:username C:\\Path\\To\\App.exe

Where username is a user of which you're sure that has the appropriate privileges. Note that you might be prompted for a pwd.

For any other issues, here's some related questions:

• php How do I start an external program running - Having trouble with system and exec
• How can I start a Windows GUI program using PHP?
• PHP - Any chance to run GUI program through exec()?

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