Exec et all not working in W2k IIS5

[Anon]

I have written a small program in visual basic that does some file manipulation and need to call this from PHP passing it some command line arguments. I have tried just about everything I can think of and cannot get it working. Here's an example of the code:
//exec()
$cmd = "wm.exe /EX:A" ;
exec($cmd) ;

or

//backticks
$cmd = wm.exe /EX:A ;
printf("-->$cmd<--") ;

or

//system()
$cmd = "wm.exe /EX:A" ;
system($cmd) ;

What I want is for the program to go off and execute in the background to finish whenever. What actually happens is the webserver starts a PHP.exe, a cmd.exe, and a wm.exe process which all hang and cannot be terminated. Running the command at a DOS prompt executes perfectly, completing it's task in less than 5 seconds and quiting.

Help... I'm at a loss...

Travis

[Anon]

Well I found out my issue is a permissions problem. I changed the anonymous user in IIS temporarily to Administrator and my program completed fine. Now I need to know if I can run commands as a specific user. Otherwise I'm going to need to change permissions on a whole bunch of files that I REALLY don't want to. Does anyone know how to change the user when running exec()?

[Anon]

in the posix library there is a seteuid() command... although
a) it probably won't work on win2k... unless they got posix compliance sometime when i wasn't looking
b) you usually have to be root before it will work. ha!

a MUCH better solution is to write a fast "wrapper" in C something like:

#includ <unistd.h>
#includ <stdio.h>

int main(void) // accept no args for safety!
{
if( seteuid( 0 ) == -1 ) {
return 0l
}
else
{
exec("my-fave-command with args");
}
}

then just make sure that this little program is owned by root (uh, administrator...) and, boom, it will be done.

now, if you want to get feedback from your command, you should replace exec with popen(), read all the data off the resulting pointer and then print it to stdout... then in your php script also use popen to harvest the output from your wrapper.

[Anon]

hey, have you found the answer yet? i am currently having problem with PHP working with Visual Basic. I want to tell PHP to send parameters to Visual Basic to do task, how to link them?

Thanks!