How to change the terminal working directory with cli script?

Question

I would like to change the directory in Linux terminal from cli script, not the PHP current working directory -- hopefully with shell_exec().

Ex: from user@host:~$ to user@host:/the/other/directory$

system() and exec() are not allowed.

This isn't working in my case:

$dir = '/the/other/directory';
shell_exec('cd '.$dir);

nor these

shell_exec('cd '.escapeshellarg($dir));
shell_exec(escapeshellcmd('cd '.$dir));
pclose(popen('cd '.$dir));

But shell_exec('ls '.$dir) gives me the list in that directory. Any trickery?

Answer 1

When you're executing several commands like you are doing:

shell_exec('cd '.escapeshellarg($dir));
shell_exec(escapeshellcmd('cd '.$dir));

It won't work. The first command has nothing to do with the second one, so you can't use the results of the 1st command to execute the 2nd command.

If you want to execute a chain of commands, use the pipe symbol | like:

echo shell_exec("ls /etc/apache2 | grep fileName");