What exec is doing is taking the rightmost command and appending it to your destination. If you have the shebang line in your php script, you shouldn't need to include the binary directive of the php interpreter.

if you just want the script's output, try:

exec('/home/quote2bi/tmp/helloworld.php > /tmp/execoutput.txt 2>&1 &')

however if you do not want the errors to be in the file, you should redirect the STDERR prior to outputting to the file. Like so:

exec('/home/quote2bi/tmp/helloworld.php 2> /dev/null > /tmp/execoutput.txt')

the above should only output the "Hello World" to the execoutput.

Edit:

Interesting you are getting this behaviour. You stated the command "ls" worked. Try making an alias for this and forward it to a file like so:

alias pexec='php /home/quote2bi/tmp/helloworld.php'

then

exec('pexec > /tmp/execoutput.txt 2>&1 &')

it seems to be a problem with the way exec handles input as opposed to the shell itself.

-John

The problem is with PHP itself, it treats everything as $argv in the script. It doesn´t redirect the output to a file ou to /dev/null.

I faced the same problem some time ago. What I did is to create a runscript.php in /opt/php-bin and then inside this script run what It should be running. Something like this:

$script = $argv[1]
$params = implode(' ', array_slice($argv, 2));
$cmd    = "{$script} {$params} > /dev/null &";

$output = array();
$return = 0;
exec("php {$cmd}", $output, $return);

exit((int)$return);

And then you call it using:

exec('/opt/php-bin/runscript.php /path/to/your/script.php arg1 arg2')

It´s the only way I managed to get this working.

Instead of just calling ".../file.php", try "php .../file.php" so that it knows how to run the file.

exec('php /usr/bin/php /home/quote2bi/tmp/helloworld.php');

To avoid the stated problems of PHP in this area, why not put this in inside a shell script? PHP can then execute the shell script which has all the redirections handled internally.

If you need to dynamically change things, then why not write the shell script and then execute it (and of course, clean up afterwards)?