In a terminal window running alert 9 gives me a popup saying 9
However, running alert 9 in shell_exec gives nothing.
What should I be aware of?
Just to mention: other commands work neither that interact with the GUI. I am using gnome 3.16.3
UPDATE
My concrete goal is to run an xdotool command using the gnome environment. ( xdotool key ctrl+shift+u )
alert is not a command, but an alias for notify-send. Aliases are loaded only in interactive shell, so it is not the best choice to test shel_exec.
These 2 command work well with php-cli:
$ php -r "shell_exec('notify-send 9');"
$ php -r "shell_exec('xdotool key ctrl+shift+u');"
The first one pops the 9 in notification area, and the last one output underscored 'u'.
Apache with mod_php is a daemon, subprocess of init, which knows nothing about xserver. If, for example, you run php built-in web server from a terminal within xserver like $ php -S 0:8080 it works as expected.
alert is not a standard command, at least on RedHat, Solaris and AIX, so you have to mention it in your question that it's a proprietary command/program
Your alert script/program does'nt consider to flush text data in standard or file output, so you can't do any redirection using pipe |, or redirect >, and finally, the php function shell_exec() can catch anything
Maybe you can redirect graphic data (i'm not sure) but generally, it's used by the graphic server
I believe PHP is launching a shell that isn't aware of your X11 environment and you need to set the $DISPLAY environment variable. Try the following modification to your shell_exec:
shell_exec("DISPLAY=\":0\" alert 9");
Related
I'm trying to execute a command on my Raspberry Pi via SSH and get the result of it in my PHP script on my Windows machine. Currently I can execute the command on my RasPi, but I do not get any results back into the PHP script.
The code I'm Using for this:
<?php
$cmd = "C:\\path_to_putty\\putty.exe -ssh pi#RasPiIP -pw raspberry -m C:\\path_to_test.txt\\test.txt";
$result = shell_exec($cmd);
echo $result;
?>
For sending commands to my RasPi the code works. I have tested multiple times by as example changing test.txt to sudo reboot and it worked as intended.
I'm using PuTTY to send my command (test.txt is currently nfc-list which returns connected Scanners etc not important right here) to the RasPi.
What I want to achieve is that $result contains the returned data when my command is executed.
Is it even possible to do that? If yes how (any help appreciated). If no, are they maybe other ways to approach this?
Addressing the possible duplicate: I am using a Windows Machine and also I'm trying to get the result (of the one command) to reuse in my PHP script. In the other question, user is trying to save the full console log and save it to another file.
First, do not use PuTTY. PuTTY is a GUI application intended for an interactive use. Use Plink, which is command-line/console equivalent of PuTTY intended for command automation. Being a console application, it has a standard output, which can be read in PHP (PuTTY as a GUI application does not have standard output).
With Plink, you can also specify the command on Plink command line, so you do not need to create the test.txt command file.
In any case, there's no way to make PuTTY or Plink separate an output of command only (at least not from a command-line).
But what you can do, is to print some header/trailer to distinguish the start and end of the command output, like:
plink.exe -ssh pi#RasPiIP -pw raspberry "echo start-of-command && command && echo end-of-command"
And then in PHP, you can look for the start-of-command and end-of-command to identify what part of Plink output is really the command output.
In any case, you better use a PHP SSH library to achieve what you want, rather then driving an external application. For example phpseclib. But that's a completely different question.
I have a Windows Server 2016 VPS with Plesk and PHP 7.1x.
I am trying to execute a simple AutoHotKey script from PHP using the following command:
<?php shell_exec('start /B "C:\Program Files\AutoHotkey\AutoHotkey.exe" C:\inetpub\vhosts\mydomain.com\App_Data\myahkscript.ahk'); ?>
This is the only line on the page. I have tried different ahk scripts, the current one simply creates a MsgBox.
When I execute my php page, on VPS Task Manager I see three processes created with the expected USR: cmd.exe, conhost.exe and php-cgi.exe. However, my PHP page just sits waiting on the server and nothing actually happens on the server.
I have also tried the same line except replacing shell_exec with exec. This seems to make no difference. I have tried without start /b with both commands. In that case the PHP page completes but no new processes are started.
I cannot find any errors in any logs: Mod_Security, Plesk Firewall, IIS.
Any ideas?
EDIT:
I tried my command from the VPS command prompt and immediately slapped in the face with the obvious issue of the space in 'Program Files'. I quoted the string as shown above and the command works. This eliminated the hang when running from PHP. However, the command still does nothing when executed from the web page.
EDIT:
Based on suggestions from the referenced post 'debugging exec()':
var_dump: string(0)""
$output: Array()
$return_val: 1
One point was that I would probably not be able to invoke GUI applications. That puts a damper on the idea.
I would like to be able to either launch php in interactive mode via phing or via PHP (worst case scenario, phing can run an adhoc task with the desired code).
I've gotten this far:
<?php
$cmd = 'php -d auto_prepend_file=bootstrap.php -a';
passthru($cmd)
And the above almost gets me what I want. I enter a shell I can interact with, but the prompts are gone (the php > at the start of each line), all meta-commands (e.g., \>) totally fail, and typing exit; does nothing instead of exit the shell. So, as you can see, this isn't the ideal shell. Is this even possible without installing phpsh?
Thanks in advance.
I think PsySH will give you want you want. It's a PHP REPL that gives you the option to configure it to automatically include a bootstrap file.
I am having an issue using the PHP function shell_exec().
I have an application which I can run from the linux command line perfectly fine. The application takes several hours to run, so I am trying to spawn a new instance using shell_exec() to manage better. However, when I run the exact same command (which works on the command line) through shell_exec(), it returns an empty string, and it doesn't look like any new processes were started. Plus it completes almost instantly. shell_exec() is suppose to wait until the command has finished correct?
I have also tried variations of exec() with the same outcome.
Does anyone have any idea what could be going on here?
There are no symbolic links or anything funky in the command: just the path to the application and a few command line parametes.
Some thing with you env
See output of env from cli (command line interface) and php script
Also see what your shell interpreter?
And does script and cli application runs from one user?
If so, se option safe_mode
Make sure the user apache is running on (probably www-data) has access to the files and that they are executable (ls -la). A simple chmod 777 [filename] would fix that.
By default PHP will timeout after 30 sec. You can disable the limit like this:
<?php
set_time_limit(0);
?>
Edit:
Also consider this: http://www.rabbitmq.com/
I have a program that returns a comma-separated string of numbers after doing some background processing. I intended to run this in symfony using shell_exec; however, all I get is NULL (revealed through a var_dump(). I tried the following debugging steps.
I ran the file (it's a PHP class) through a command-line lime unit test in Symfony - it works and gives the correct result there.
Just to check, I tried a simple command ls -l at the same place to see whether I would get anything. Again, I had the same problem - the var_dump in the browser showed NULL, but it worked through the command line.
What could be the problem? Are there restrictions on running shell_exec() in a browser?
EDIT: Just to clarify, shell_exec() commands work when I run them as standalone php scripts on the web server (for example, by putting them in my document root. They don't seem to be working under the symfony framework, for some reason.
I finally solved it, and it turned out to be something quite simple, and quite unrelated.
The shell command I was running was in this format: face_query -D args. I didn't realize that Apache would be executing PHP as user www-data and thus the program face_query wouldn't be in the PATH (the directory is actually ~/bin). Changing the program name to the full path of the program solved it.
I also gather from this that only commands which www-data has permission to execute can be run. In this case, www-data is in the same group as my user, but it might be a problem otherwise.
Have you tried using exec? Or one of the other variants. I am never sure of which one to use and always lump with exec.
http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
Is your web server running php in safe mode?
Note: This function is disabled when PHP is running in safe mode.
From: http://php.net/manual/en/function.shell-exec.php