PHP Start Background Scripts in either Linux or Windows without waiting for completion

on *ix it's as simple as
  exec("whatever &");
( also possible system(), passthru(), shell_exec() ...)
or more elegant using pcntl_fork(), see http://php.net/manual/en/function.pcntl-fork.php
or probably simply using fork()

on windows ... have fun :-/  (example never tested):
pclose(popen("start whatever", "r"));

Ray,
Not sure how this is working, but it does. My calling script continues without holding up the user and the script I call with CURL completes.  I know this is not asynchronous really, but it is doing what I want in both Windows and Linux environments.  Thanks for the technique.

What was wrong with the answer?

Nothing wrong per say, but it's not really starting a parallel asynch task as I wanted. It works, but that's because we don't care what the output is and don't do anything if we don't get it.

OK, then tell me what this means:  this is not asynchronous really.  Perhaps you and I have different definitions of "asynchronous."

As I understand the issue, your file upload completes very fast, but the processing of the file takes a very long time, so much so, that the client is made to wait much longer for the processing than for the upload.  So you want to decouple the upload from the long, slow processing step.  In that sense it's not a description of an asynchronous task - it's a description of a sequential process involving two tasks.  There is nothing at all standing in the way of sending an email from the second script when it is completed.  You would want to be very careful about debugging this script because the client cannot see any browser output, but it's certainly not a case of "don't care."  In MY application, I don't care.  But that is not the same as saying the process is flawed in some way.

Well, you are correct. I apologize if it sounded like I didn't think the solution was good.  I do and I'm using it.  I understand what you're saying about sequential versus asynch processing. I just really wanted to understand how I start a PHP script from either LAMP or WAMP environment by calling PHP and passing it the script to run.  Kind of like we run CRON jobs. It starts a PHP instance and passes it the script name.  It runs completely standalone from any other script.  From what I understand of your solution, it essentially does the same thing and won't tie anything to the users login session, so that's really the equivalent of what I'm after.  Thanks for your knowledge, I've been trying all kinds of things to get it to work in Windows to no avail. The solution hoffmann gave about works for Linux.  Your solution works in both.

OK, good.  I thought maybe something was wrong because of the marked-down grade.  Glad it's OK, ~Ray

ok, it works, but not as you asked for (and not as a computer should do it, IMHO;-)