Executing unix shell commands using PHP

Question

A text box will be used to capture the command. I've been told that I have to use the exec() function to execute UNIX shell commands.

Something like this, user types ls in the text box. The exec() function will execute the UNIX command and the command will be displayed on the web page.

What I want to know how will I get the output of the shell command and display in the web browser using PHP.

I don't know where to start since I'm very new to PHP.

I'm using Ubuntu.

Answer 1

exec?

system?

shell_exec?

passthru?

Backticks?

Pfah!

Real developers use proc_open! It has the major and distinct advantage of giving you three PHP streams to feed data into the process, and read both stdout and stderr. This is something that the other process execution functions simply don't do well.

It comes at the small cost of some boilerplate code, so it's a bit more verbose. I consider the trade-off to be excellent.

Oh, and running arbitrary commands from your users is perhaps one of the greatest security risks that you could ever conceive of, but I kind of assume you know this by now.

Answer 2

Use $output = system($command);

See http://php.net/system and don't forget to read the warnings about security. If you let a user pass any data to system() (or exec() etc.) it's almost as if they had a shell on your server. The same applies if you don't sanitize arguments passed to programs executed through these functions properly.