Accessing the Command Line From PHP

This tutorial will explain the different methods of accessing the system command line from a PHP script. Being able to run external programs can come in handy, and fortunately there are multiple functions that will do this. We will explain the differences betweeen these so you can choose the best one for your purpose. The functions covered are exec(), system(), passthru(), and shell_exec(), as well as escapeshellcmd() and escapeshellarg(). See the manual for more information on these functions.