How to select user input from a shell script in PHP? - php

Question

I've this shell script running from a PHP site.
In the shell script (Audit shell script),
I have 3 options:
1) Process script
2) Display results
3) Exit
Tried the codes below and doesn't seem to work, the PHP site displayed blanks.
<?php
session_start();
exec('/Desktop/test.sh');
exec('1');
$output = exec('2');
echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
?>
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

<?php
session_start();
// This line executes '/Desktop/test.sh' as if it had been called from the
// command line
// exec('/Desktop/test.sh');
// This line attempts to execute a file called '1', which would have to be
// in the same directory as this script
// exec('1');
// This line attempts to execute a file called '2', which would have to be
// in the same directory as this script, and capture the first line of the
// output in $output
// $output = exec('2');
// I think you want to be doing something more like this - this executes the
// shell script, passing "1" and "2" as arguments, and captures the whole
// output as an array in $output
exec('/Desktop/test.sh "1" "2"', $output);
// Loop the output array and echo it to the browser
echo "<pre>";
foreach ($output as $lineno => $line) echo "Line $lineno: $line\n";
echo "</pre>";
?>
It seems to me that you could do with reading the manual page for exec() properly...

Answer 2

Try using proc_open instead of exec; it gives you more control of process input/output. Something like:
<?php
$descriptorspec = array(
0 => array("pipe", "r"), // stdin is a pipe that the child will read from
1 => array("pipe", "w"), // stdout is a pipe that the child will write to
2 => array("file", "/dev/null", "a") // stderr is a file to write to
);
$cwd = '/Desktop';
$env = array();
$process = proc_open('/Desktop/test.sh', $descriptorspec, $pipes, $cwd, $env);
if (is_resource($process)) {
// $pipes now looks like this:
// 0 => writeable handle connected to child stdin
// 1 => readable handle connected to child stdout
// Any error output will be sent to /dev/null (ie, discarded)
fwrite($pipes[0], "1\n");
fwrite($pipes[0], "2\n");
fclose($pipes[0]);
$output = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
fclose($pipes[1]);
// It is important that you close any pipes before calling
// proc_close in order to avoid a deadlock
$return_value = proc_close($process);
echo $output;
}
?>
Note: I've lifted this code from the PHP Manual's proc_open page