rethaew has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Good afternoon. I want to start a perl script on a remote web server using http. That is easy. But the problem is that I need the http connection to end before the remote server script is done. I don't need to wait for it to complete, just a reply that it is has started is fine. Let me illustrate: Local server script runs this code: 
use LWP::Simple;
get "http://remoteserver.com/startrunning.pl";

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Remote web server with script startrunning.pl runs: 
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "ok";
#need to kill the http connection here

#start doing lots of things that are time consuming
blah1();
blah2();
...

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I want to start the startrunning.pl script on the remote web server, but I can't have the local script that made the original http call waiting for the remote server to finish. I just need to trigger the startrunning.pl scrip and then drop the http connection. I hope this make sense and I hope there is a solution. Thank you.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Trigger perl scrip remotely using http
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 25, 2009 at 20:19 UTC 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

$SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE';

if (fork()) {
    print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
    print "ok";
    exit;
}

close(STDIN);
close(STDOUT);
close(STDERR);

#start doing lots of things that are time consuming
blah1();
blah2();
...

    [download]

    You can add error checking to fork and direct STDERR to a log file, but you get the idea.

    A better solution would provide feedback to the user. This article shows how it can be done.

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[d/l]
[select]
      Just to clarify, this suggestion is to do a fork on the server so the parent process (the one you call over http) starts a child and then returns content to your client script immediately. The parent will then exit while the child happily continues forever.
[reply]
      Yes, works perfectly. Thank you.
[reply]

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