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I'm making a scan server for my company, which will be used to launch scans from tools such as nessus, nmap, nikto etc. I've written the pages in PHP, but I need to have control over the subsequent processes (spawned with nohup and backgrounded with &) as I need to perform various actions once the scans have completed (such as emailing them, downloading reports off the nessus server etc).

I was advised on here to create a python daemon that the PHP pages communicated with. I've googled endlessly, but I can't find anything that explains the logic behind the communication from a beginner's perspective (coding a daemon will be my most advanced project yet). I'm aware of IPC and unix domain sockets for example, but not sure as to how I can employ them in my situation. As such, I'm after some advice or pointers as to what I should do.

I was thinking I could create a python script with a while loop that constantly checks to see if the process has terminated and when it does, perform the appropriate post process termination action. The script would be daemonized so it runs in the background and I would call it from the PHP pages with the PID as a parameter, which I could access with the argparse module for example.

Am I on the right lines in terms of logic - or are there better solutions?

Any help, or just something to google, is much appreciated! Thanks

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I think something like gearman would certainly make it easier to implement this.

Gearman is a job server which lets you start jobs, query if the job is still running and fetch the output of the job (as text).

It supports PHP and Python (among others).

(This answer made me feel like a salesman).

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So your plan is: PHP spawns nmap & a watchdog. Watchdog keeps polling for nmap to finish running and then does some post processing once its done.

Slightly cleaner would be: PHP spawns a 'process manager' (which also you write). This process manager is basically a program that executes nmap in a child process, waits for this child process to finish (using the 'wait' system call, which for example in C looks like: http://linux.die.net/man/2/wait), and does the post processing.

It will also be more efficient because a 'wait' will probably be cheaper than repeatedly checking if the PID has terminated.

If you like python more than C, python has subprocess management too: http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html

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this does sound interesting - however, part of the design spec is that there's code that monitors the number of processes spawned from the php pages - so after x amount no more are allowed to be created until some have finished, to help reduce server load. From what you've said it seems like a new process manager is spawned each time, so would the above be possible? Or would I need a process manager the process manager ^^ - thanks!
The 'process manager' is basically sleeping most of the time. So if the intent of the design spec is purely to ensure that the server is not overloaded, then 'process manager' instances shouldn't be counted. The worker processors should be, however.

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