Live output of shell script using `watch` in browser? - php

I've seen PHP reading shell_exec live output and PHP: Outputting the system / Shell_exec command output in web browser, but can't get the following working.
NB: originally, my shell script was running some python, but I have simplified it.
live.sh
uname -a
date
watch --no-title date
live.php
<?php
$cmd = "sh live.sh";
while (# ob_end_flush()); // end all output buffers if any
$proc = popen($cmd, 'r');
echo '<pre>';
while (!feof($proc))
{
echo fread($proc, 4096);
# flush();
}
echo '</pre>';
?>
The uname and date outputs appear in the browser okay, but the watch output does not.
Am I in fact attempting the impossible?

I would advise against the approach of using watch, and you are probably in for more trouble than you expect.
Firstly, long running command might be affected by the (default) PHP timeout, so you may have to tweak that.
Then, watch probably uses terminal sequences to clear the screen, and I am not sure how this translates to the output code.
I would rather suggest setting up a client side mechanism to periodically repeat a call to the sever side live.php.
This post on SO will help you get started.
jQuery, simple polling example
the page above uses the jquery library, but you could use native Javascript equivalent if you want to.
The simplest example (from that page) would be :
function poll(){
$("live.php", function(data){
$("#output_container").html(data);
});
}
setInterval(function(){ poll(); }, 5000);
In your page, set up a container for your results
<div id="output_container"></div>
In your example, you remove the watch from your script and replace it with the command you intended watching.

You probably want this only for some special thing. So, for those you can try ajaxterm.
Really easy to use, (4.line installation)
wget http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/files/Ajaxterm-0.10.tar.gz
tar zxvf Ajaxterm-0.10.tar.gz
cd Ajaxterm-0.10
./ajaxterm.py
and you will get full bash running interactively in the browser. (after the login/password). Written in python, so easily adaptible for you. Also, see here.

Related

Open Linux terminal command in PHP

I have a server running on Linux that execute commands to 12 nodes (12 computers with Linux running in them). I recently downloaded PHP on the server to create web pages that can execute commands by opening a specific PHP file.
I used exec(), passthru(), shell_​exec(), and system(). system() is the only one that returns a part of my code. I would like PHP to act like open termainal command in linux and I cannot figure out how to do it!
Here is an example of what is happening now (Linux directly vs PHP):
When using linux open terminal command directly:
user#wizard:/home/hyperwall/Desktop> /usr/local/bin/chbg -mt
I get an output:
The following settings will be used:
option = mtsu COLOR = IMAGE = imagehereyouknow!
NODES = LOCAL
and additional code to send it to 12 nodes.
Now with PHP:
switch($_REQUEST['do'])
{ case 'test':
echo system('/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt');
break;
}
Output:
The following settings will be used:
option = mtsu COLOR = IMAGE = imagehereyouknow!
NODES = LOCAL
And stops! Anyone has an explanation of what is happening? And how to fix it? Only system displays part of the code the other functions display nothing!
My First thought is it can be something about std and output error. Some softwares dump some informations on std out and some in std error. When you are not redirecting std error to std out, most of the system calls only returns the stdout part. It sounds thats why you see the whole output in terminal and can't in the system calls.
So try with
/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt 2>&1
Edit:
Also for a temporary work through, you can try some other things. For example redirect the output to file next to the script and read its contents after executing the command, This way you can use the exec:
exec("usr/local/bin/chbg -mt 2>&1 > chbg_out");
//Then start reading chbg_out and see is it work
Edit2
Also it does not make sense why others not working for you.
For example this piece of code written in c, dumps a string in stderr and there is other in stdout.
#include <stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
int main()
{
fputs("\nerr\nrro\nrrr\n",stderr);
fputs("\nou\nuu\nuttt\n",stdout);
return 0;
}
and this php script, tries to run that via exec:
<?php
exec("/tmp/ctest",&$result);
foreach ( $result as $v )
{
echo $v;
}
#output ouuuuttt
?>
See it still dumps out the stdout. But it did not receive the stderr.
Now consider this:
<?php
exec("/tmp/ctest 2>&1",&$result);
foreach ( $result as $v )
{
echo $v;
}
//output: errrrorrrouuuuttt
?>
See, this time we got the whole outputs.
This time the system:
<?php
echo system("/tmp/ctest 2>&1");
//output: err rro rrr ou uu uttt uttt
?>
and so on ...
Maybe your chbg -mt writes additional code to stderr instead of stdout? Try to execute your script inside php like this:
/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt 2>&1
The other responses are good for generic advice. But in this specific case, it appears you are trying to change your background on your desktop. This requires many special considerations because of 'user context':
First, your web server is probably running as a different user, and therefore would not have permissions to change your desktop.
Second, the program probably requires some environmental variables from your user context. For example, X programs need a DISPLAY variable, ssh-agent needs SSH_AGENT_PID and SSH_AUTH_SOCK, etc. I don't know much about changing backgrounds, but I'm guessing it involves D-Bus, which probably requires things like DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS, KONSOLE_DBUS_SERVICE, KONSOLE_DBUS_SESSION, and KONSOLE_DBUS_WINDOW. There may be many others. Note that some of these vars change every time you log in, so you can't hard-code them on the PHP side.
For testing, it might be simpler to start your own webserver right from your user session. (i.e. Don't use the system one, it has to run as you. You will need to run it on an alternate port, like 8080). The web server you start manually will have all the 'context' it needs. I'll mention websocketd because it just came out and looks neat.
For "production", you may need to run a daemon in your user context all the time, and have the web server talk to that daemon to 'get stuff done' inside your user context.
PHP's system only returns the last line of execution:
Return Value: Returns the last line of the command output on success, and FALSE on failure.
You will most likely want to use either exec or passthru. exec has an optional parameter to put the output into an array. You could implode the output and use that to echo it.
switch($_REQUEST['do'])
{ case 'test':
exec('/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt', $output);
echo implode('\n', $output); // Could use <br /> if HTML output is desired
break;
}
I think that the result of execution, can changes between users.
First, try to run your PHP script directly into your terminal php yourScript.php
If it runs as expected, go to your Apache service and update it to run with your own credentials
You are trying to change the backgrounds for currently logged in users... While they are using the desktop. Like while I'm typing this message. I minimize my browser and 'ooh my desktop background is different'. Hopefully this is for something important like it turns red when the reactor or overheating.
Anyway to my answer:
Instead of trying to remotely connect and run items as the individual users. Setup each user to run a bash script (in their own account, in their own shell) on a repeating timer. Say every 10 minutes. Have it select the SAME file.. from a network location
/somenetworkshare/backgrounds/images/current.png
Then you can update ALL nodes (1 to a million) just by changing the image itself in /somenetworkshare/backgrounds/images/current.png
I wrote something a while ago that does just this -- you can run a command interpreter (/bin/sh), send it commands, read back responses, send more commands, etc. It uses proc_open() to open a child process and talk to it.
It's at http://github.com/andrasq/quicklib, Quick/Proc/Process.php
Using it would look something like (easier if you have a flexible autoloader; I wrote one of those too in Quicklib):
include 'lib/Quick/Proc/Exception.php';
include 'lib/Quick/Proc/Exists.php';
include 'lib/Quick/Proc/Process.php';
$proc = new Quick_Proc_Process("/bin/sh");
$proc->putInput("pwd\n");
$lines = $proc->getOutputLines($nlines = 10, $timeoutSec = 0.2);
echo $lines[0];
$proc->putInput("date\n");
$lines = $proc->getOutputLines(1, 0.2);
echo $lines[0];
Outputs
/home/andras/quicklib
Sat Feb 21 01:50:39 EST 2015
The unit of communication between php and the process is newline terminated lines. All commands must be newline terminated, and all responses are retrieved in units of lines. Don't forget the newlines, they're hard to identify afterward.
I am working on a project that uses Terminal A on machine A to output to Terminal B on Machine B, both using linux for now. I didnt see it mentioned, but perhaps you can use redirection, something like this in your webserver:
switch($_REQUEST['do'])
{ case 'test':
#process ID on the target (12345, 12346 etc)
echo system('/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt > /proc/<processID>/fd/1');
#OR
#device file on the target (pts/0,tty0, etc)
echo system('/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt > /dev/<TTY-TYPE>/<TTYNUM>');
break;
}
Definitely the permissions need to be set correctly for this to work. The command "mesg y" in a terminal may also assist...Hope that helps.

Running script and executing PHP for output

I'm looking to run a program, and for every output line it generates, execute a PHP script and pass the line content to it.
I know, pretty hard to understand. Here's an example:
Execute script -> script outputs 'Initializing script on 127.0.0.1'. Now it needs to execute a command like php5 input.php 'Initializing script on 127.0.0.1'.
Is this doable? If so, how would I go about doing this?
Edit: to clarify; I basically want command > log.txt but in stead of writing the output to that file, writing it to a PHP script as an argument
PHP is an interpreter much like Bash, Python, etc, so you can do "normal" scripting with it. For example:
#!/usr/bin/php5
<?php
echo "Hello, world!\n";
while($line = fgets(STDIN)) {
echo "> " . $line;
}
?>
Mark the file as executable, then run:
$ /program/that/generates/lines | /path/to/your/php/script
However, contrary to your original question, it sounds to me like you actually want to use JavaScript and possibly AJAX for web purposes. Sane web applications will have the said script run in the background and safely write the results to a file or stream, using AJAX to read it and update the information on the current page.

PHP exec - echo output line by line during progress

I'm trying to find a way in which I can echo out the output of an exec call, and then flush that to the screen while the process is running. I have written a simple PHP script which accepts a file upload and then converts the file if it is not the appropriate file type using FFMPEG. I am doing this on a windows machine. Currently my command looks like so:
$cmd = "ffmpeg.exe -i ..\..\uploads\\".$filename." ..\..\uploads\\".$filename.".m4v 2>&1";
exec( $cmd, $output);
I need something like this:
while( $output ) {
print_r( $output);
ob_flush(); flush();
}
I've read about using ob_flush() and flush() to clear the output buffer, but I only get output once the process has completed. The command works perfectly, It just doesn't update the Page while converting. I'd like to have some output so the person knows what's going on.
I've set the time out
set_time_limit( 10 * 60 ); //5 minute time out
and would be very greatful if someone could put me in the right direction. I've looked at a number of solutions which come close one Stackoverflow, but none seem to have worked.
Since the exec call is a blocking call you have no way of using buffers to get status.
Instead you could redirect the output in the system call to a log file. Let the client query the server for progress update in which case the server could parse the last lines of the log file to get information about current progress and send it back to the client.
exec() is blocking call, and will NOT return control to PHP until the external program has terminated. That means you cannot do anything to dump the output on a line-by-line basis because PHP is suspended while the external app is running.
For what you want, you need to use proc_open, which returns a filehandle you can read from in a loop. e.g.
$fh = proc_open('.....');
while($line = fgets($fh)) {
print($line);
flush();
}
There are two problems with this approach:
The first is that, as #Marc B notes, the fact that exec will block until it's finished. You'll have to devise some way of measuring progress.
The second is that using ob_flush() in this way amounts to holding the connection between server & client open and dribbling the data out a little at a time. This is not something that the HTTP protocol was designed for and while it might work sometimes, it's not going to work consistently - different browsers and different servers will time out differently. The better way to do it is via AJAX calls: using Javascript's setTimeout() function (or setInterval()), make a call to the server periodically and have the server send back a progress report.

retrieve R output in PHP

Here's the issue:
I am using R to run some statistical analysis. The results of which will eventually be sent to a an embedded swf on the user's client machine.
To do this, I have PHP execute a shell script to run the R program, and I want to retrieve the results of that program so I can parse them in PHP and respond with the appropriate data.
So, it's simply:
$output = shell_exec("R CMD BATCH /home/bitnami/r_script.R");
echo $output;
But, I receive nothing of course, because R CMD BATCH writes to a file. I've tried redirecting the output in a manner similar to this question which changes my script to
$output = shell_exec('R CMD BATCH /home/bitnami/raschPL.R /dev/tty');
echo $output;
But what I get on the console is a huge spillout of the source code, and nothing is echoed.
I've also tried this question's solution in my R script.
tl;dr; I need to retrieve the results of an R script in PHP.
Cheers!
If it writes to file perhaps you could use file_get_contents to read it?
http://php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php
Found it, the answer is through Rscript. Rscript should be included in the latest install of R.
Using my code as an example, I would enter this at the very top of r_script.R
#!/usr/bin/Rscript --options-you-need
This should be the path to your Rscript executable. This can be found easily by typing
which Rscript
in the terminal. Where I have --options-you-need, place the options you would normally have when doing the CMD BATCH, such as --slave to remove extraneous output.
You should now be able to run your script like so:
./r_script.R arg1 arg2
Important! If you get the error
Error in `contrasts<-`(`*tmp*`, value = "contr.treatment") :
could not find function "is"
You need to include the "methods" package, like so:
require("methods");
Perhaps,a much simpler workaround, would be:
$output = shell_exec('R CMD BATCH /home/bitnami/raschPL.R > /dev/tty 2>&1');
echo $output;
Redirects both STDOUT and STDERR, since R outputs to STDERR, by default.

shell output to web

I need a way to display a linux shell output on a web page. I know there are many webshells but none of them let me display a time changing output (with commands like: top, watch... ), i need a shell based network analyzer so i couldn't start and stop it each time because it need's to run continuously.
Is there any simple way to do this? I don't need any interaction with the shell, just the output of a given command.
thank in advance
Lopoc
In PHP you can use exec(): http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
$last = exec('ls', $o, $r);
$o will hold the output and $r will hold the return code and $last will hold the last line of output. In general, You'll typically use it like:
$last = exec('ls', $o, $r);
if ($r != 0)
{
print 'Error running command';
exit($r);
}
else
print implode("\n", $o);
top is an interactive program, the command will continue forever and PHP/exec() will continue waiting for it to finish. You can use top -b -n1 for "batch mode". See top(1) for more information about top's arguments.
If you want a more generic solution which will work for any command, you can use popen() (or proc_open()) run from a xmlrpc script. This is a much more complicated setup though, and required some knowledge about UNIX process control. Doing this correctly is far from trivial...
PS: top's arguments vary from OS to OS. On Linux, you use top -b -n 1, on FreeBSD it's top -b 999 (Where 999 is the number of lines to display). Not sure if this matters for you, but it's good to keep in the back of your head.
Depending on the program you launch, there should be switches like
$ top -n1
That will give you the output you're looking for in form of a snapshot.
Just make the outputting php script refresh itself after the number of seconds you need.
A popular way to do so that works in most browsers is to add a so called Meta Refresh:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5">
Example: Refresh the actual page after five seconds.
If you don't want to learn another language you may want to look into the general CGI module which already supports
A quick google search yields javassh.org. I'm sure there are others.
I found a website that may be helpful in your situation - https://eggshell.pjy.us . The output of your command can be included as an iframe on your page

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