Run shell commands with PHP

Run shell commands with PHP – Be it Within a Content Management System Like WordPress or Simple PHP Script.System program execution is documented in PHP Manual. Occasionally server, for example goes down and possibly you are wondering if it is possible to start remotely using PHP to check the port or do something.

Run shell commands with PHP : Getting Started

It basically sounds difficult to run shell commands with PHP, but several way exists :

PHP actually has a special operator for executing shell commands, it is a dirty easy trick – by using the backtick ( ):

But for much control over the execution one need to use functions like proc_open.

Run shell commands with PHP : Examples

PHP will attempt to execute the contents of the backticks as a shell command; the output will be returned, basically the usage of the backtick operator is identical to shell_exec() :

Example with MySQL :

passthru execute an external program and display raw output :

Now, you have a shell script named deploy.sh that has the following content:-

popen` opens process file pointer, example :

There is an interesting part for WordPress to execute commands, you can execute simple shell commands and output them to the browser :

There is no credit written who wrote it, we actually used it ago. You can edit it without asking us.