shell_exec without waiting for the output [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: Closed 11 years ago.

Possible Duplicate:

Asynchronous shell exec in PHP

Is there a way to use shell_exec without waiting for the command to complete?

I want to run a 开发者_开发知识库quite slow / complex program which takes at least 10 minutes to complete. I want to call this via shell_exec or something similar, but I dont want the php script to wait for the completion of this program.

is thing something I can do? and if so how can I do that?

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This has been answered before at Asynchronous shell exec in PHP

Briefly:

shell_exec( $your_command . "> /dev/null 2>/dev/null &" );