Tim Van Wassenhove

Passionate geek, interested in Technology. Proud father of two

01 Apr 2006

Using cmd.exe

Earlier someone asked me how he could use windows cmd.exe with PHP. People run into trouble as soon as there are quotes needed because there are special characters (>/&()[]{}^=;!’+,`~ and ) in the command. I do it like this

<?php
$result = `""c:\\my path\\prog.exe" "filename""`;
?>

In case you have to do it often you might want to wrap it into a little function like this

<?php
function cmd($command, $arguments = null)
{
        $commandline = '';
        foreach(func_get_args() as $word) {
                $commandline .= '"' . $word . '" ';
        }
        $commandline = rtrim($commandline, ' ');
        $commandline = '"' . $commandline . '"';
        return `$commandline`;
}

// run blah.exe
cmd('blah.exe');

// run c:\my path\blah.exe with the arguments "foo" and "bar bar"
cmd('c:\\my path\\blah.exe', 'foo', 'bar bar');
?>