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Nov 14th, 2008

How to pass information to child processes

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My problem is that I have a PHP application that needs to (in Windowsese) multi-task. I am relatively new to PHP and equally new to Linux. I need to know how to pass information from a parent process to a child process and vice versa. If somebody could please provide an example, it would be very much appreciated.

Hoppy

hopalongcassidy

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Nov 16th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by hopalongcassidy ...

My problem is that I have a PHP application that needs to (in Windowsese) multi-task. I am relatively new to PHP and equally new to Linux. I need to know how to pass information from a parent process to a child process and vice versa. If somebody could please provide an example, it would be very much appreciated.

Hoppy

Do you have some code you're currently working with? Could you post this if possible?

digital-ether

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Nov 16th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

Of course not. If I knew how to pass info from one process to another, I would not have asked the question!

hopalongcassidy

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Nov 16th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by hopalongcassidy ...

Of course not. If I knew how to pass info from one process to another, I would not have asked the question!

The reason to post code was to clarify your question. It was incredibly vague. In what context are you passing information between processes?

ShawnCplus

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Nov 17th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

My question is not the least bit vague. It is perfectly clear. Let's say, for example, that I had a parent process whose job it was to read a file containing URLs. And that each child process was supposed to read the contents of a given URL and save it to a disc file.
In this case, I would want the parent to create a child for each URL and pass the URL to the child which would in turn read its contents and store it in a file on disc. Perhaps, the child would return to the parent, the name of the file in which the contents of the URL are saved.

What I am looking for is the PHP mechanism by which the URL can be passed to the child and the name of the file in which the contents of the URL is stored can be returned to the parent.

Something like SendData($parentid, $childid, &dataaddress, datalen);

Is that any clearer?

Hoppy

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Nov 17th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

The only current way to do anything of that sort is on execution of a child process with http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.pcntl-exec.php

ShawnCplus

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Nov 17th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

I read the URL you provided and especially the user contributed notes that followed. It appears to me that the folks that designed the process control portion of PHP (pcntl) were rank amateurs with little real world experience.

Using pcntl_exec after forking really misses the mark. It has no way to pass anything back to the parent, not even a return code.

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Nov 17th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by hopalongcassidy ...

I read the URL you provided and especially the user contributed notes that followed. It appears to me that the folks that designed the process control portion of PHP (pcntl) were rank amateurs with little real world experience.

Using pcntl_exec after forking really misses the mark. It has no way to pass anything back to the parent, not even a return code.

Excellent, then write your own extension to PHP to implement process control the way it should be handled. It's open source, don't complain unless you have something meaningful to contribute as a retort.

ShawnCplus

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Nov 17th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

Good idea. Maybe I will.

hopalongcassidy

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Nov 18th, 2008

Re: How to pass information to child processes

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by hopalongcassidy ...

I read the URL you provided and especially the user contributed notes that followed. It appears to me that the folks that designed the process control portion of PHP (pcntl) were rank amateurs with little real world experience.

Using pcntl_exec after forking really misses the mark. It has no way to pass anything back to the parent, not even a return code.

Take a look at:
http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_p...gementetc.html
http://www.php.net/proc_open
http://www.php.net/socket_create_pair
http://www.php.net/sem

digital-ether

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