Execute extneral programs with interactivity?

[weberjacob]

I'm using PHP in command-line mode. I would like to run an external
command, and have it interact with the user just as if he had ran it
from a shell. (I don't need my script to send input to the command).
Ideally I would also like to capture the STDOUT into a variable,
although this is not a requirement.

None of the PHP program-execution commands seem to work for me. The
closest I've come is:
system("ftp")
which takes user input, but it seems to buffer the output until you
type something other than a carriage return. I want it to behave
exactly as it does from a shell. Is this possible?

Thanks,
Jacob

[Mike Willbanks]

we********@gmail.com wrote:

I'm using PHP in command-line mode. I would like to run an external
command, and have it interact with the user just as if he had ran it
from a shell. (I don't need my script to send input to the command).
Ideally I would also like to capture the STDOUT into a variable,
although this is not a requirement.

None of the PHP program-execution commands seem to work for me. The
closest I've come is:
system("ftp")
which takes user input, but it seems to buffer the output until you
type something other than a carriage return. I want it to behave
exactly as it does from a shell. Is this possible?

Thanks,
Jacob

Take a look at proc_open.

http://www.php.net/proc_open
--
Mike Willbanks
Zend Certified Engineer
http://www.digitalstruct.com

[weberjacob]

I looked at that ... after checking out some of the examples, I was
able to make it do basically the same thing that system() or popen()
was doing. It still doesn't seem to handle user input normally.

I guess I need to send the stdin (from the PHP script) to the stdin of
the process that I open. But how do I do that?

Thanks,
Jacob

[Colin McKinnon]

we********@gmail.com wrote:

I looked at that ... after checking out some of the examples, I was
able to make it do basically the same thing that system() or popen()
was doing. It still doesn't seem to handle user input normally.

I guess I need to send the stdin (from the PHP script) to the stdin of
the process that I open. But how do I do that?

Thanks,
Jacob

On Microsoft/Linux/Unix with a recent PHP:

$inh=fopen("stdin://", 'r');

With Linux/some Unix:
$inh=fopen("/dev/stdin", 'r');

C.