A real WTF?!?

[Anon]

Okay, here's a snippet of code (with a bunch of debugging) that does nothing even close to what it should:

$userinfo = passthru("/usr/bin/finger -lpm " . escapeshellarg($username) . " | grep Name");
print strlen($userinfo); //prints '0'
print $userinfo; //prints 'Login: cas1650 Name: Chris St. Pierre
print strlen($userinfo); //prints '0'
print substr($userinfo, 1); //prints nothing
print $userinfo; //prints nothing
print substr($userinfo, strpos($userinfo, "Name: ") + 6); //prints nothing

What I want is for the last line to print just the name ("Chris St. Pierre"). Why does the strlen() function return 0 when $userinfo so clearly has a value? And, perhaps more importantly, why does $userinfo cease to have a value?

[theslinky]

that's odd. in the PHP manual, there is no mention of a return string from the function passthru. Have you tried the system() function?

-sridhar

[[deleted]]

I think you wil find this is a big homer's DOH!

passthru's description in the manual:
-- quote --
passthru -- Execute an external program and display raw output

Description

void passthru (string command [, int return_var])
-- end quote --

in short, it prints everything to screen, and returns absolutely nothing.
That's why strlen($userinfo) returns 0: $userinfo really IS empty.

try using backticks instead of passthru:

$command = "/usr/bin/finger -lpm ". escapeshellarg($username) . " | grep Name";
$userinfo = $command;