how to display system() output?

[Anon]

Hi,

I'm trying to echo the output of a shell script, but failing miserably -

I started off with exec, but I gather that won't echo any shell output, and have gotten a little closer by using system($input, $output);
echo $output;

but this echo's 0 if executed, and 2 if there's an error.

So all I can do at the moment is
if ($output==0) echo "Execution successful";
if ($output==1) echo "Execution failed";

I would still like to include the 'if' statements, but have the shell output echo to the screen for debugging etc.

How can I convert the '2' to something useful

[Anon]

Try the backtick operator:

$output=command;

captures everything otherwise sent to stdout into $output.

[Anon]

thanks -
it doesn't catch faithfully the output that the command line gives. I've found there are many ways to skin a cat on this particular matter (thanks to all that emailed a reply during the outage recently), and have found that the title of the problem should be 'how to output a command line error'

eg the command line for
ls /usr/nosuchfile
is
ls: /usr/nosuchfile No such file or directory

I need to output that error exactly to the browser, and as far as I can see, it isn't possible.