Executing shell commands on a HTML gui - on local machine only - php

Question

So I'm working on an application of my own where i need to execute shell commands, and even execute csh scripts on button clicks.All the HTML code is doing is displaying results from some sensors i have set up on my arduino via firefox, so im basically using it as a GUI. The HTML page wont ever be online, its purely running on my own machine.
I understand that its not straight forward as having HTML run shell commands on a live webpage is a security issue, but i have been reading about being able to execute shell commands using php scripts, but as it is running on a standalone PC i dont know how to integrate it into running a command from a button click on the page.
Infact i have no experience in using php at all, and i wouldnt even know where to start getting it to run through my HTML code.
Help!
edit:
If not php, is there any other way i can run a command such as 'ls' from a button click on the html page?
Oli

Answer 1

You can use the exec php function, and execute your scripts like this exec('/path/myscript.sh')
But surely you have to setup your php/apache in a correct way. Just try to look for some basic web-server configuration tutorials.

Answer 2

php command exec should execute a command and retrieve standard output.
<?php
$result = exec("wc -l /etc/issue");
print($result);
?>
With that print command you can print any html-text, that will be inserted into the page the client receives and displays. So simply surround that php-snippet with you actual web page.

Answer 3

General idea, you can create a HTML form with buttons that correspond to specific shell commands ( I understand this won't be LIVE on the web, so the security risks might not be an issue).
From there, you would receive the form input in PHP (you can use a framework like Laravel which makes this much easier to handle frontend/backend communication - http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/html http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/requests)
A quick example with HTML and PHP:
<form id="arduino" method="post" action="{{ url('arduino/control') }}">
<input type="text" name="command"/>
<input type="submit">
</form>
<?php
Route::post('arduino/control', function () {
$command = Input::get('command');
exec($command);
});