[Zimwy]

Hi,
I was wondering if there's a way to run a shell command from a web page, and print its output to that web page? It seems like PHP should be able to do this sort of thing? For instance, how would I get a web page to display the entire output from "uptime" ?

Thanks!
gabe

[ameat]

Originally posted by Zimwy:
Hi,
I was wondering if there's a way to run a shell command from a web page, and print its output to that web page? It seems like PHP should be able to do this sort of thing? For instance, how would I get a web page to display the entire output from "uptime" ?

Thanks!
gabe

not having done this in a while, i believe you would do this:
[PHP]
echo `uptime`;
[/PHP]

...anyways, check out the reference pages at www.php.net for backtick usage.

[bzImage]

just create a simple cgi-script.

-- cut here
#!/bin/sh
echo "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"
uptime
-- cut here

just put it on your cgi-bin directory, add the right permissions, and thats it..

[Zimwy]

Hey, the backtick thing works great, almost... Okay, I'm a bit stumped by this. If I do:
[PHP]
echo `lsof`;
[/PHP]

It works fine, but if I do:
[PHP]
echo `lsof | awk '/mp3/'`;
[/PHP]
THen I get nothing. The thing is that the second command works perfectly fine in the terminal. I've tried giving full path names to lsof and awk, no luck there. lsof alone works fine. I'm stumped. Any ideas? Other commands, such as uptime work fine as well. Help!

Gabe

[ameat]

Originally posted by Zimwy:
Hey, the backtick thing works great, almost... Okay, I'm a bit stumped by this. If I do:
[PHP]
echo `lsof`;
[/PHP]

It works fine, but if I do:
[PHP]
echo `lsof | awk '/mp3/'`;
[/PHP]
THen I get nothing. The thing is that the second command works perfectly fine in the terminal. I've tried giving full path names to lsof and awk, no luck there. lsof alone works fine. I'm stumped. Any ideas? Other commands, such as uptime work fine as well. Help!

Gabe

...hmm, beats me why you can't pipe stuff, but why don't you just use php's regular expressions to handle it. assign the backtick output to a variable and then run select what you need...

[Zimwy]

I'll definitely look into select. I've searched the PHP page for it, and I can't find it. Do you have any hints of where to get started for doing awk and grep-like things within php? Thanks. With the pipe, thing is that it does work. I do it to get uptime into a more readable format by piping it to awk. It just won't work with lsof. I can't pipe lsof to grep, or awk, or anything. Very confusing...

gabe

[ameat]

Originally posted by Zimwy:
I'll definitely look into select. I've searched the PHP page for it, and I can't find it. Do you have any hints of where to get started for doing awk and grep-like things within php? Thanks. With the pipe, thing is that it does work. I do it to get uptime into a more readable format by piping it to awk. It just won't work with lsof. I can't pipe lsof to grep, or awk, or anything. Very confusing...

gabe

...i didn't mean run the "select" function. i meant run a regular expression to "select" what you want. sorry for the misunderstanding...

[Simon Mundy]

Have you tried it with the exec command? A lot of contributors have noted that the backtick method sends your commands through a shell, whilst exec calls your commands directly.

[Zimwy]

Hey,
No dice there either.

Thanks though

[bzImage]

Originally posted by Simon Mundy:
Have you tried it with the exec command? A lot of contributors have noted that the backtick method sends your commands through a shell, whilst exec calls your commands directly.

err..

the only difference its that exec does not spawn a new shell to run the command.

so in this case there its no difference..