Running oowriter headless command using php exec() not executing - php

I'm having issues using oowriter to convert a doc to a pdf using php exec(). The line i'm running below works fine in CLI, just not in php using exec().
$stdin = "/usr/bin/oowriter --headless --convert-to pdf -outdir /var/data/uploads/ /var/data/uploads/lorem.docx";
exec($stdin,$stdout,$return_int);
$stdout returns an empty Array and $return_int returns 0.
I've searched around and the only possible solution I could find was adding the path to oowriter (which you can see i have done). Is there a permissions issue running this command as the apache user? There are a few posts on exec() not working in general, but I can successfully run commands for imagemagick using this method. Therefore it seems to me that this an application specific configuration issue with openoffice.
Appears to be a duplicate of the following, but no answers have been posted:
unable to run oowriter as web user
FYI I'm using CentOS V6.1 and PHP v5.3.3. Thanks.

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Yet when I use wget on the terminal command line, it quickly downloads the file contents.
So why does file_get_contents not work for this? Here is my php code, which produces the Warning:
$testDownload = file_get_contents("https://ebird.org/region/US-AL-001?yr=all");
echo $testDownload;
On my Ubuntu terminal command line, here is my bash code, which works quickly and flawlessly:
wget https://ebird.org/region/US-AL-001?yr=all
I want to use php because I want to automate the downloading of a number of files and need a fair bit of code to do it, and I feel much more comfortable using php than bash.
P.S. I tried various "context" solutions for the file_get_contents function that were suggested on Stack Overflow, but they did not solve the problem.
P.P.S. I earlier tried cURL and got the same redirects Warning, though I admit to not knowing much about cURL.
I found a solution: the shell_exec() function in php allows me to use bash's wget command line function within my php script. I tried it and it worked. (I will have to change the ownership of the downloaded files to get access to them.) Here is the code that worked:
$output = shell_exec('wget https://ebird.org/region/US-AL-005?yr=all');
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I want to execute a command in ubuntu terminal. When I directly run the command in terminal, it runs without any problem. But What I actually want to do is to execute this command via PHP.
chdir('/home/thilini/FYP/testone/bin/');
exec('./mindtct input_folder/filename output_folder/filename');
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The problem was an issue in the path. A forward slash was missing.
If you're running below php 5.4,check "safe_mode" in your ini file.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.safe-mode.functions.php
You probably want
exec('./mindtct input_folder/filename output_folder/filename');
Maybe you should set error_reporting(-1) in your script so you get some errors
You want to use shell_exec(), not exec().
shell_exec() executes a command in the terminal, whereas exec() opens an application.
$results = shell_exec('./mindtct input_folder/filename output_folder/filename');
print_r($results);
This will execute the command, store it in results, and then print_r the results in array format.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
http://php.net/manual/en/function.shell-exec.php

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Here is what i did in command prompt.
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I am running the server on localhost using XAMPP. Any idea what is missing?

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