How do I escape a PHP script to an external editor and return afterwards?

Question

Specifically I have a PHP command-line script that at a certain point requires input from the user. I would like to be able to execute an external editor (such as vi), and wait for the editor to finish execution before resuming the script.

My basic idea was to use a temporary file to do the editing in, and to retrieve the contents of the file afterwards. Something along the lines of:

$filename = '/tmp/script_' . time() . '.tmp';

get_user_input ($filename);

$input = file_get_contents ($filename);
unlink ($filename);

I suspect that this isn't possible from a PHP command-line script, however I'm hoping that there's some sort of shell scripting trick that can be employed to achieve the same effect.

Suggestions for how this can be achieved in other scripting languages are also more than welcome.

Answer 1

You can redirect the editor's output to the terminal:

system("vim > `tty`");