Hi, I would recommend using a library that manages this in a good way: https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/process.html#running-processes-asynchronously This way you can start a process and wait for it to finish and obtain it's exit code once it's done. In the meantime you can even feed it with input and fetch it's output. There are other libraries that do that, not only symfony process but this one is usually my first choice as it works in all environments windows/linux and it's well tested and used a lot. Regards, Alex On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 4:15 PM Jānis Elmeris <janis.elmeris@xxxxx> wrote: > > Hello! > > I would like to start a PHP script in the background from within another PHP script. I would like to monitor all error cases properly. > > Is there an easy way to see if that background script was started successfully? The background script would write its errors into an error log that I'm monitoring. But what about starting the script itself? > > I'm trying to start a background script like this: > > exec('nohup php sleeps.php > /tmp/tt 2>&1 &', $output, $status); > error_log('execute_shell: ' . var_export(['status' => $status, 'output' => $output], true)); > exec('nohup php sleeps_nonexist.php > /tmp/tt 2>&1 &', $output, $status); > error_log('execute_shell: ' . var_export(['status' => $status, 'output' => $output], true)); > > The first `exec` runs all right in the background (asynchronously). > The second one behaves in exactly the same way (`$status === 0`), even though file "sleeps_nonexist.php" does not exist. > > Running in the command line manually, this would give status `0`: > nohup php sleeps.php > /tmp/tt 2>&1 > echo $? > > This would give status `1`: > nohup php sleeps_nonexist.php > /tmp/tt 2>&1 > echo $? > > Regards, > Janis