In a new tutorial over on DZone.com Giorgio Sironi talks about handling external processes in PHP and how to work with streams.

I've come to known a bit about spawning and monitoring new processes from PHP code, while working at Onebip and trying to contribute to Paratest. Here's what you need to know if you think exec() or executing everything in a single .php script is always enough.

He starts with a look at the differences between using things like exec and streams for handling the spawning of other processes. He shows how you have more control when you go with the streams option and process handling with the "proc_*" methods. He also touches on some other things to think about like stream blocking, sleeping and dealing with multiple execution streams (and switching between them).