I faced the problem of putting a shell script as a backgroud process using both exec() and system() commands on a FreeBSD Server with PHP 4.4.0
I tried all the above mentioned methods but couldnt succeded, then i coded this script and am sure will work on all Linux flavors... See if ot helps you all guys...
I Put my Shell Script in the variable $ExecCommand
and used the proc_close and proc_open functions the code is as follows :
proc_close (proc_open ($ExecCommand,array(),$somefun));
After the above line the rest of the usual php script continues....
Hope it helps you guys..