PHP's passthru() vs shell_exec()

Question

The function passthru() is good when the output contains binary data as the function outputs the raw output. However, the documentation for the function shell_exec() does not say whether the data returned is binary safe (=raw).

So, my question here is that does shell_exec() return the raw output? Or do I need to use ob_start() , ob_get_contents() and ob_end_clean() with passthru() to get the raw output?

Answer 1

It returns a string with the data written to the standard output. Strings in PHP are binary safe; they can contain \\0 characters.

Such characters will be included in the result of shell_exec() if the executed command resulted in those characters being written. What you do with that is up to you.

Output buffering is irrelevant here; shell_exec() doesn't output anything to the client, it only returns a string.