I want to develop a console for php and I wanted to know how to retreive and output the result of a unix command.
At first I outputed the command to a file and read the file with php but some commands don't allow the "> filename" option.

is there another way to do that?

thx

Nice idea, a PHP console. I guess it will be like a telnet session in your browser.

For program execution functions, look at http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.exec.php. I don't know why your "> output" doesn't work. On UNIX systems, the >, < etc. are not parsed by the program, but by the shell, e.g. bash. Maybe you work with PHP on windows??? Maybe your command line is not parsed by a normal shell so that you can't use > ???

Anyway, I think that you need the proc_open and proc_close functions. You can access either input or output with a file descriptor, just like ordinary files.

How are you going to make this interactive? For example when the user hits a character on his keyboard, how are you going to give that key to the PHP script? Does the PHP script run in an infinite loop (which means that the page will never completely be loaded), or does it end (which may mean that the child process also ends)?

I was only gonna make a form since it is just for a few commands (and I'm a php newb) if you have a better idea, I'll be glad to hear it

for the > option, try it with the useradd command, on my redhat9 the output of the command is not directed to the file

thx

I suppose you could make it keep running until that command finishes, and then open the page again for another command. Stuff with ncurses might be hard...

To get the output of a unix commmand inside PHP, the easiest is to use popen(). See http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.popen.php

But this does not let you write to the input and read from the output from the same process. You probably really need this for a web-terminal. To overcome this, you need to use l(ike cjp already said) proc_open(). See http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.proc-open.php

Especially for your idea (the "web-terminal") there's an interesting note in the latter page, referring to PHP5:
Having an interface to PTY's essentially means it will give you the same potential an xterm has.

why not do it like this:

$result = shell_exec($command);

echo $result ;

?

just so that people know :

what shadow_wwp says works but it's better to append 2>&1 at the end of the command so that even when the command results in an error, it returns the error string.

example:
$result = shell_exec( $command." 2>&1" );