How to retrieve PHP exec() error responses?

Question

Below is the command I tried executing, without success:

exec('ln -s ' . PLUGIN_DIR . '/.htaccess ' . ABSPATH . '/.htaccess'); 

When you add a die() at the end, it catches that there's an error:

exec('ln -s ' . PLUGIN_DIR . '/.htaccess ' . ABSPATH . '/.htaccess') or die('what?!'); 

For the above exec() statement, a permissions problem is causing the error, but PHP isn't displaying it. How do you display from PHP what error is occurring?

Answer 1

The following code will capture both the normal output (from StdOut) and the error output (from SdtErr).

exec('ln -s ' . PLUGIN_DIR . '/.htaccess ' . ABSPATH . '/.htaccess 2>&1',$output); var_dump($output);