calling system commands

[Anon]

i am trying to accomplish a mysqldump. this is the setup, the user clicks a link, the database is dumped, written into a file, the file is attached and sent to the user. to do this i am trying to use the passthru function. this is the command that i am using:

passthru("mysqldump --password=xxxxxxxx general", $t);

then if i print t:

print $t

it give me a 2. system also give me a 2. and exec give me an empty array. i know that i am doing something wrong here. can someone give me a little push in the right direction.

thanks

[gid__]

passthru returns the return value as the second argument in the function, which is your var $t, so that's the return value. In your case, the return value is 2, which is probably an error.
passthru() spits out data by default, no need to print or echo anything.

Oh! You have to give mysqldump the user you want to login as, web server runs as nobody, so that's what mysqldump is trying to log in as.

passthru('mysqldump -uchris -pXXXXXX general' $t);

On a side note, use single quotes for strings that have no vars or escaped chars in them, it's noteably faster for php to parse through them (yes I've actually done tests), just my tip of the day. 🙂