PHP Developers Cookbook (2nd Edition)

Technique

Use the passthru () function, which will print the results of your shell command directly to standard output:

<?php passthru('date'); ?>

Comments

If you simply need to execute a command and display the output to the browser, use the passthru() function, which frees you from worrying about the intermediate steps. (This is similar to fpassthru() and readfile() , which act on files.)

Gotcha

I stressed this in the previous recipe, but I will also stress it here: Always use the EscapeShellCmd() function when accepting data from your users. In that way, harmful shell characters are escaped.

passthru(EscapeShellCmd($submitted_data));