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To: internals@lists.php.net
Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 21:43:13 +0400
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Subject: shell_exec, environment, and multithreading servers
From: dmda@yandex.ru ("jvlad")

Hi all,

Recently I faced with one funny problem in PHP. Seems there is no way to run 
a sub-process using shell_exec() (or backticks), and pass there specially 
crafted environment without affecting all running threads. As soon as I 
update the environment, all other threads see the change. It's 
multithreading nature to be running under the same process and share the 
process environment, no problems so far, but there should be a way to run 
sub-process with appropriate set of environment variables without affecting 
all the threads.

Looks like for Win32 target, there is a popenex() function that is called by 
shell_exec and this function has env parameter. I think it makes sense to 
pass $_ENV in this argument. Certainly, $_ENV should be converted into array 
of pointers.
Not sure if there is any way under unix other  than using execXX() instead 
of popen() to get the same behaviour.

Thoughts?

-jv