An alternative for Windows environment is to use the COM object. With this, you can start child process with Apache, or php.exe as parent process. Very useful for CLI or console PHC-Win applications.
if(!function_exists('pcntl_exec')){
function pcntl_exec($path,$args=array()){
if(is_string($args)) $args = array($args);
if(count($args)) $path = '"'.$path.'"';
$shell = new COM('WScript.Shell');
$shell->run($path.(count($args) ? ' '.implode(' ',$args) : ''),0,true);
}
}
Very useful too when you want to use ansicon. Instead of make a .bat file with ansicon -p and php .... (somefile).php, in your .php file you can put this on top of your code:
pcntl_exec('ansicon -p');
BINGO!