Dear Monks,
I hereby ask your wisdom on the following problem:
I have set up a simple web-server in PHP, with a submission form (textarea). When the user submits the form, the contents are put into a file and a perl script is being executed on the file. The output of the script is written in a text file at the end, also an image is being produced.
My question has two parts:
1) Because this script takes some time to execute, I think it is not a good practice to just let it run on the web-server, since there is great possibility it will hang and then it will not output anything. So I thought the best is to just get the input from the user and then just send an email to him saying "your work is completed" with a link that will be an HTML page with the results.
Does this sound reasonable practice to you?
2) Can you give me some hints as to how such a thing is accomplished? I mean, what steps should I follow and maybe point me to some examples of sending emails to user that can direct the user to an HTML page with the final results?
Thank you in advance!

In reply to Best practice for sending results to a user via email by Anonymous Monk

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