I'm trying to read python output from a php webapp.
I'm using $out = shell_exec("./mytest") in the php code to launch the application, and sys.exit("returnvalue") in the python application to return the value.
The problem is that $out doesn't contain my return value.
Instead if I try with $out = shell_exec("ls"), $out variable contain the output of ls command.
If I run ./mytest from terminal it works and I can see the output on my terminal.
sys.exit("returnvalue")
Using a string with sys.exit is used to indicate an error value. So this will show returnvalue in stderr, not stdout. shell_exec() only captures stdout by default.
You probably want to use this in your Python code:
print("returnvalue")
sys.exit(0)
Alternatively, you could also use this in your PHP code to redirect stderr to stdout.
$out = shell_exec("./mytest 2>&1");
(In fact, doing both is probably best, since having stderr disappear can be quite confusing if something unexpected happens).
Related
I have a PHP file that runs a node script using exec() to gather the output, like so:
$test = exec("/usr/local/bin/node /home/user/www/bin/start.js --url=https://www.example.com/");
echo $test;
It outputs a JSON string of data tied to the website in the --url paramater. It works great, but sometimes the output string is cut short.
When I run the command in the exec() script directly, I get the full output, as expected.
Why would this be? I've also tried running shell_exec() instead, but the same things happens with the output being cut short.
Is there a setting in php.ini or somewhere else to increase the size of output strings?
It appears the only way to get this working is by passing exec() to a temp file, like this:
exec("/usr/local/bin/node /home/user/www/bin/start.js --url=https://www.example.com/ > /home/user/www/uploads/json.txt");
$json = file_get_contents('/home/user/www/uploads/json.txt');
echo $json;
I would prefer to have the direct output and tried increasing output_buffering in php.ini with no change (output still gets cut off).
Definitely open to other ideas to avoid the temp file, but could also live with this and just unlink() the file on each run.
exec() only returns the last line of the output of the command you pass to it. Per the section marked Return Value of the following documentation:
The last line from the result of the command. If you need to execute a command and have all the data from the command passed directly back without any interference, use the passthru() function.
To get the output of the executed command, be sure to set and use the output parameter.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
To do what you are trying to do, you need to pass the function an array to store the output, like so:
exec("/usr/local/bin/node /home/user/www/bin/start.js --url=https://www.example.com/", $output);
echo implode("\n", $output);
With a PHP script which runs in CLI mode, I want to get the cursor position in a portable way.
With the code :
// Query Cursor Position
echo "\033[6n";
In the terminal, this code reports the cursor position, as
wb ?> ./script.php
^[[5;1R
wb ?> ;1R
But, I can't retrieve the two values (row: 5, column: 1) in the code.
After some tests with output buffering :
ob_start();
echo "\033[6n";
$s = ob_get_contents();
file_put_contents('cpos.txt',$s);
I've "\033[6n" in the cpos.txt file, not the device answer.
And reading STDIN :
$timeout = 2;
$sent = false;
$t = microtime(true);
$buf = '';
stream_set_blocking(STDIN,false);
while(true){
$buf .= fread(STDIN,8);
if(!$sent){
echo "\033[6n";
$sent = true;
}
if($t+$timeout<microtime(true))
break;
}
var_dump($buf);
The buffer is empty but the terminal show the device answer :
wb ?> ./script.php
^[[5;1R
string(0) ""
wb ?>
Is there a way, without curses, to get the cursor position ?
The code you have so far almost works, and you'll find that hitting enter and waiting for your timeout to complete does produce a string containing the answer, but with a \n character on the end. (Note the string length of 7 instead of 0.)
$ php foo.php
^[[2;1R
string(7) "
"
The issue here is that stream_set_blocking does not prevent the terminal from buffering input line-by-line, so the terminal doesn't send anything to stdin of your program until the enter key is pressed.
To make the terminal send characters immediately to your program without line-buffering, you need to set the terminal to "non-canonical" mode. This disables any line-editing features, such as the ability to press backspace to erase characters, and instead sends characters to the input buffer immediately. The easiest way to do this in PHP is to call the Unix utility stty.
<?php
system('stty -icanon');
echo "\033[6n";
$buf = fread(STDIN, 16);
var_dump($buf);
This code successfully captures the response from the terminal into $buf.
$ php foo.php
^[[2;1Rstring(6) ""
However, this code has a couple of issues. First of all, it doesn't re-enable canonical mode in the terminal after it's finished. This could cause issues when trying to input from stdin later in your program, or in your shell after your program exits. Secondly, the response code from the terminal ^[[2;1R is still echoed to the terminal, which makes your program's output look messy when all you want to do is read this into a variable.
To solve the input echoing issue, we can add -echo to the stty arguments to disable input echoing in the terminal. To reset the terminal to its state before we changed it, we can call stty -g to output a list of current terminal settings which can be passed to stty later to reset the terminal.
<?php
// Save terminal settings.
$ttyprops = trim(`stty -g`);
// Disable canonical input and disable echo.
system('stty -icanon -echo');
echo "\033[6n";
$buf = fread(STDIN, 16);
// Restore terminal settings.
system("stty '$ttyprops'");
var_dump($buf);
Now when running the program, we don't see any junk displayed in the terminal:
$ php foo.php
string(6) ""
One last potential improvement we can make to this is to allow the program to be run when stdout is redirected to another process / file. This may or may not be necessary for your application, but currently, running php foo.php > /tmp/outfile will not work, as echo "\033[6n"; will write straight to the output file rather than to the terminal, leaving your program waiting for characters to be sent to stdin as the terminal was never sent any escape sequence so will not respond to it. A workaround for this is to write to /dev/tty instead of stdout as follows:
$term = fopen('/dev/tty', 'w');
fwrite($term, "\033[6n");
fclose($term); // Flush and close the file.
Putting this all together, and using bin2hex() rather than var_dump() to get a listing of characters in $buf, we get the following:
<?php
$ttyprops = trim(`stty -g`);
system('stty -icanon -echo');
$term = fopen('/dev/tty', 'w');
fwrite($term, "\033[6n");
fclose($term);
$buf = fread(STDIN, 16);
system("stty '$ttyprops'");
echo bin2hex($buf) . "\n";
We can see that the program works correctly as follows:
$ php foo.php > /tmp/outfile
$ cat /tmp/outfile
1b5b323b3152
$ xxd -p -r /tmp/outfile | xxd
00000000: 1b5b 323b 3152 .[2;1R
This shows that $buf contained ^[[2;1R, indicating the cursor was at row 2 and column 1 when its position was queried.
So now all that's left to do is to parse this string in PHP and extract the row and column separated by the semicolon. This can be done with a regex.
<?php
// Example response string.
$buf = "\033[123;456R";
$matches = [];
preg_match('/^\033\[(\d+);(\d+)R$/', $buf, $matches);
$row = intval($matches[1]);
$col = intval($matches[2]);
echo "Row: $row, Col: $col\n";
This gives the following output:
Row: 123, Col: 456
It's worth noting that all this code is only portable to Unix-like operating systems and ANSI/VT100-compatible terminals. This code may not work on Windows unless you run the program under Cygwin / MSYS2. I'd also recommend that you add some error handling to this code in case you don't get the response from the terminal that you expect for whatever reason.
(this is really a comment, but it's a bit long)
Using hard coded terminal sequences is a very long way from "portable". While most terminal emulators available currently will support ANSI, vt100 or xterm codes which have a common base there is a very well defined API for accessing interactive terminals known as "curses". A PHP extension is available in pecl. This is just a stub interface to the curses system - present on any Unix/Linux system. While it is possible to set this up on mswindows, using cygwin or pdcurses, it's not an easy fit. You omitted to mention what OS you are working on. (The mswindows console uses ANSI sequences)
There is a toolkit (hoa) based on termcap (predecessor to curses) which might be useful.
To "retrieve" the data you just need to read from stdin (although it would be advisable to uses non-blocking up for this).
This is my code for executing a command from PHP:
$execQuery = sprintf("/usr/local/bin/binary -mode M \"%s\" %u %s -pathJson \"/home/ec2/fashion/jsonS/\" -pathJson2 \"/home/ec2/fashion/jsonS2/\"", $path, $pieces, $type);
exec($execQuery, $output, $return);
the $return value is always 0 but $output is empty. The $output should be a JSON.
If I execute the same but removing one letter to binary (for example /usr/local/bin/binar ) I get (correctly) a $return = 127.
If I write other parameters (like -mode R which doesn't exit) I got errors from the console (which are correct as well).
If I run the exact $execQuery (which I printf before to be sure about quotation marks) on the console, it executes correctly. It's only the PHP side where I've got the error.
What can be wrong?
Thank you in advance.
Well, a couple of things might be happening...
This binary you're running write to something else that STDOUT (for instance, STDERR)
The env vars available to the PHP user differ from the env vars available to the user running console (and those vars are required)
PHP User does not have permission to access some files involved.
In order to debug, it might be better to use proc_open instead of exec, and check the STDOUT and STDERR. This might give you additional information regarding what's happening.
Suggestion (and shameless advertising)
I wrote a small utility library for PHP that executes external programs in a safer way and provides aditional debug information. It might help you to, at least pinpoint the issue.
I'm running a simple command in a loop
the command itself is ffmpeg, but I do not believe it's related to the issue
so, I have:
exec($exec.' 2>&1', $output, $return);
if($return)
{
foreach($output as $line)
{
file_put_contents($log_file, $line, FILE_APPEND);
}
}
This way, if anything goes wrong with the command I can read the output in the log. It works, however $output contains the entire shell history of the command. To clarify: every time an error occurs, all output that was generated by the particular command (including hundreds of successful executions from throughout the day) is dumped to the file. What should be a 5 line error being written is instead the entire 1000+ line history. I used the exact same code on CentOS and it gave me the expected output of only the output generated by the instance most recently executed.
From the documentation:
Note that if the array already contains some elements, exec() will append to the end of the array. If you do not want the function to append elements, call unset() on the array before passing it to exec().
I can't explain why it worked differently on CentOS.
I'm building a RAKEFILE and I want to display the output on a php generated page as it gets executed.
I tried using system() since the PHP docs mention this:
The system() call also tries to automatically flush the web server's output buffer after each line of output if PHP is running as a server module.
This seems to work with multiple shell comands but when I execute rake I only get the first line:
(in /Users/path/to/proj)
Any ideas?
Cheers!
Try use exec() function
exec($command, $output);
$output is an array
//retrieved data
for($out = '',$x = 0,$len = count($output); $x < $len; $x++) {
$out .= $output[$x] . "\r\n";
}
or simple:
$out = join("\r\n", $output);
The system() call also tries to automatically flush the web server's output buffer after > each line of output if PHP is running as a server module.
This means you would only get the last line of output from the return value. The example in the system() manual page shows that and it suggests to use passthru() to get raw output. I usually use exec() though.
Turs out both functions system() & exec() actually work. The generated rake output when using --verbose isn't taken into consideration though. That's why I was confused. If anyone has more extensive knowledge on the distinction, do share :)