Executing a shell command within PHP

Question

On the terminal, I run this successfully within the web application's directory:

pdftohtml -c -noframes "documents/document1.pdf"

Now I want to do this through PHP, so I wrote a shell.sh file that looks like this:

sudo pdftohtml -c -noframes "documents/$file"
exit 0

Then I wrote this in php:

$output = shell_exec("file='document1.pdf' shell.sh");

It doesn't work, I expect to see html files generated, but I get some empty html files..since the command worked fine through the terminal, then I think the problem is in the way I execute it from php

echoing $output doesn't show anything.. what do I do wrong?

Are you running the PHP file through sudo, so it gets the permissions you used before? — halfer
– halfer, Commented Jul 27, 2012 at 16:47
It looks like there's a couple helpful hints in the comments of the shell_exec reference page specifically what was mentioned about sudo needing a password and also the possibility that you might need to redirect stderr to stdout (2>&1) to get any output. — Gordon Bailey
– Gordon Bailey, Commented Jul 27, 2012 at 16:47
try redirecting stderr to /dev/null and see if you still get output pdftohtml 2>/dev/null -c -noframes "documents/document1.pdf". If you don't see anything then it means that the output is written to stderr and you'll need to redirect stderr to stdout for shell_exec to give any output. — Gordon Bailey
– Gordon Bailey, Commented Jul 27, 2012 at 16:49

Igor Chubin · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-27 17:53:44Z

2

You need specify path to the script (or ./ if it is the current directory):

shell_exec("file='document1.pdf' ./shell.sh")

edited Jul 27, 2012 at 17:53

answered Jul 27, 2012 at 16:52

Igor Chubin

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2 Comments

Mohamed Khamis Over a year ago

This gives me a shell.sh: command not found I should get an html file per page in document1.pdf, I only get a single empty one

Igor Chubin Over a year ago

run file='document1.pdf' ./shell.sh

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