DevShed continues their look at standalone PHP scripts (server-side scripting, not on the web) in part two, "Managing Standalone Scripts in PHP" excerpted from the book "Advanced PHP Programming" from George Schlossnagle.

Last week, we began our discussion of PHP standalone scripts. This week, we'll be talking about child processes, shared resources, signals, and writing daemons.

They jump right in, going first for a look at forking off child processes from the script using the pcntl functionality you'll need to build into PHP. Resource management is key to working with server scripts, and they show you how to close them out when you're through. Next up is a brief look at the types of signals that you can send to the child processes, and some good rules to follow for writing daemons in PHP.