Hello all.

I'm new to the Linux programming scene, although I've been using non-OS-specific PHP for some time.

I was just wondering: Is it possible to return values using PHP such as system uptime, kernel version, free memory, cpu load and so on?

Ideally, there would be a variable containg all of these things in one handy place.
Is there?

You could just use the reversed quotes like a shell script,

Wow, I didn't know you could do that.

Is this what's meant by 'magic quotes', or am I thinking of something totally different?

This functionality has taken me completely by surprise
Are there any other significant ones?
How do they work?
How uniform are they throughout different coding languages?

And to think, I was beginning to consider meself less of a newbie

[EDIT:]
Ah, I understand now - it's executing the program 'uptime' except in a way that leaves the output usable as a string. I was thinking it was something along the lines of an environment variable

More infos : http://www.php.net/manual/en/languag....execution.php

You could also use system()

I tried that for getting the kernel version, but the trouble is it echoes the result straightaway.

My problem was that I didn't know uptime was a program - I thought it was some sort of keyword that if you enclosed in those special quotes, would magically give you a string telling you how long the system's been running.

I'm guessing those 'reversed quotes' are common across most C-like languages then, right?

Hey, I wonder if javascript'll do it in iexplore

*runs of to Wine installation*