Best way to manage long-running php script?

Certainly it can be done with PHP, however you should NOT do this as a background task - the new process has to be dissocated from the process group where it is initiated.

Since people keep giving the same wrong answer to this FAQ, I've written a fuller answer here:

http://symcbean.blogspot.com/2010/02/php-and-long-running-processes.html

From the comments:

The short version is shell_exec('echo /usr/bin/php -q longThing.php | at now'); but the reasons "why", are a bit long for inclusion here.

The quick and dirty way would be to use the ignore_user_abort function in php. This basically says: Don't care what the user does, run this script until it is finished. This is somewhat dangerous if it is a public facing site (because it is possible, that you end up having 20++ versions of the script running at the same time if it is initiated 20 times).

The "clean" way (at least IMHO) is to set a flag (in the db for example) when you want to initiate the process and run a cronjob every hour (or so) to check if that flag is set. If it IS set, the long running script starts, if it is NOT set, nothin happens.