Page 1 of 1

killing process through exec()

Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 10:25 pm
by fahadist
I am developing a webservice in PHP/Linux where I need to kill a process.

I tried using
exec("kill ".$pid);
and
exec("kill -KILL ".$pid);

but the return value was always 1 and the process still remained.

I wrote up a small shell script and have exec run that script. The script worked fine if invoked through command line but through php it didn't do anything.

I have a hunch that this is because killing a process might need root privilages so I updated the script to:

sudo -p my_passsword -u root kill $pid

yet it didn't work.

I still think the problem is access rights. question is how to solve it.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely
Fahad

Re: killing process through exec()

Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 11:47 pm
by Christopher
I think if you su to the user who runs the webserver and then sudo the process you want to kill, then you will be able to kill it.

Re: killing process through exec()

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 3:12 am
by fahadist
How do I do that in PHP?

after each exec the state will be lost.

Fahad

Re: killing process through exec()

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 3:27 am
by fahadist
Under which user rights does the apache/php server work?

Fahad