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system and popen


You can easily run system commands in php using either 'system' or 'popen'.

Using the system command provides little control and basically dumps the raw output.


system('ls -al');

Most programs will not usually output a html formatted response, resulting in it all being on a single line.

You could capture the data using the output control functions such as 'ob_start', 'ob_get_contents' and 'ob_end_clean'. They basically redirect the output stream and allow us to capture it in a variable. We then change all the new line symbols into html br tags using the 'nl2br' function.


function exe($cmd)
{
   ob_start();
   system($cmd);
   $l = ob_get_contents();
   ob_end_clean();
   $l = nl2br($l);
   return $l;
}

print exe('ls -al');



Personally I prefer to use popen. Here's an example to show it in action. I've written the 'popen' handling into a function which returns the outputted response as an array.


function exe($cmd){
   $aret=array();
   if(!$f=popen($cmd,'r')){return null;}
   while(!feof($f)){
      $o=fgets($f,1024);
      $aret[]=$o;
   }
   pclose($f);
   return $aret;
}

$a=exe('ls -al');
foreach($a as $e){
   print $e."<br />";
}



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rabbit By rabbit Created on 24th of June 2010, at 10.55 am
Category: PHP: File IO

rabbitin on again!

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