All righty, I was just wondering something. Is it possible to make a script that will call another script...but that script is not within the same language? Say a PHP script calling a BASH script or something?

What I am hoping to accomplish is that a username variable will get added to a MySQL Database via PHP or something...then another script will extract that username and add them as a system user so they can have their own directory for FTP and what not.

Could something like this be done. I have done PHP scripting but nothing like this...haven't done BASH scripting yet but willing to learn, especially to do what I am talking about here.

Yes. You just have to know what each item uses for input/output mechanisms.

For example in bash it uses variables which can be defined by name or by number if positional. So on the command line you type something like:

export TEST=<testarg>

within your bash script you just call the variable by prefixing its name with a $ for example:

echo "Now using $TEST within my script."

The above command would replace $TEST with whatever you'd typed in as <testarg> during the export.

A more common way though would be to use positional parameters. Any argument on the command line to a script gets a numeric value starting with 1 so that the first argument is $1, the next is $2 and so on.

So say you have a script named talkback.sh that just contains:

#!/bin/bash
echo "You typed $1"

Typing "talkback supecalifragilisticexpiallodocious" would result in:

You typed supecalifragilisticexpiallodocious

In Perl it uses argv[] as the input argument designator so your first would be argv[1], your second argv[2] and so on.

So you just need to know what PHP uses for such positional arguments to be able to pass one into it. I don't use PHP but am quite sure it must have such a mechanism.

to run a program from a php script use the function:
exec("/usr/sbin/yourscript");
or system("/usr/sbin/yourscript"); if I'm not wrong
You can run any program like this. Of course the path could be different

But make sure that there are the right privileges, and that you won't compromise the system security by doing this.