How to run multiple commands in system, exec or shell_exec?

Question

I'm trying to run shell command like this from php:

ls -a | grep mydir

But php only uses the first command. Is there any way to force php to pass the whole string to the shell?

(I don't care about the output)

Answer 1

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.proc-open.php

First open ls -a read the output, store it in a var, then open grep mydir write the output that you have stored from ls -a then read again the new output.

LE:

<?php
//ls -a | grep mydir

$proc_ls = proc_open("ls -a",
  array(
    array("pipe","r"), //stdin
    array("pipe","w"), //stdout
    array("pipe","w")  //stderr
  ),
  $pipes);

$output_ls = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
fclose($pipes[0]);
fclose($pipes[1]);
fclose($pipes[2]);
$return_value_ls = proc_close($proc_ls);


$proc_grep = proc_open("grep mydir",
  array(
    array("pipe","r"), //stdin
    array("pipe","w"), //stdout
    array("pipe","w")  //stderr
  ),
  $pipes);

fwrite($pipes[0], $output_ls);
fclose($pipes[0]);  
$output_grep = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);

fclose($pipes[1]);
fclose($pipes[2]);
$return_value_grep = proc_close($proc_grep);


print $output_grep;
?>

Answer 2

The answer:

PLEASE avoid extensive solutions for such trivial things. Here it is the solution: *as it would be so long to do it in php, then do it in python (using subprocess.Popen in python would take three lines), and then call python's script from php.

It's about seven lines in the end, and the problem ends up solved:

Script in python, we'll call it pyshellforphp.py :

import subprocess
import sys
comando = sys.argv[1]
obj = subprocess.Popen(comando, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE,   shell=True)
output, err = obj.communicate()
print output

how to call the python script from php:

system("pyshellforphp.py "ls | grep something");

Answer 3

You can use

$output = shell_exec('ls -a | grep mydir');

Documentation for shell_exec

Answer 4

If you want the output from the command, then you probably want the popen() function instead:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.popen.php