This is a little tricky so bear with me:
a.php that is launched from the command line and data is provided to it via STDINb.phpa.php launch b.php and capture its output.a.php has to forward the STDIN to b.phpIs there an easy way to do this?
For just capturing the stdout of another program (php or not), you can use backticks: http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.execution.php. For example:
$boutput = `php b.php`;
To capture stdin, do this:
$ainput = file_get_contents('php://stdin');
Finally, to pipe the contents of a string to an external program, use proc_open, as suggested by jeremy's answer. Specifically, here's what your a.php should contain:
$ainput = file_get_contents('php://stdin');
$descriptorspec = array(
0 => array("pipe", "r"),
1 => array("pipe", "w"),
2 => array("pipe", "w")
);
$process = proc_open('php b.php', $descriptorspec, $pipes);
fwrite($pipes[0], $ainput);
fclose($pipes[0]);
echo stream_get_contents($pipes[1]); # echo output of "b.php < stdin-from-a.php"
fclose($pipes[1]);
proc_close($process);
B.php to accept commands via STDIN when calling from A.php? Would it not be better to just include from that point, and wrap the output around an ob_start and ob_get_flush command?
'php b.php' to fopen.
proc_open is disabled on my server... oh dear... now what?