Executing multiple shell commands from PHP

[budda]

Is it perfectly legal in PHP to execute more than one command in an external shell call?

I have a command line:

/usr/bin/zip -r "../archives/myHPEportfolio-2002_2003Backup" /home/Mike/mynhsappraisal/documents/3/32/2002_2003/* -x \*.html

Which fails when run from within PHP (no error/result given) but runs fine from a Bash session.

I even put the full path to the 'zip' command as suggested in another thread.

I've tried the following ways to run my PHP code:

        $cmd = "cd $userarea" . $d['archiveyear'] .";";
        $cmd .= "/usr/bin/zip -r \"../archives/" . $g_ps['core']['productname'] . "-" . $d['archiveyear'] . "Backup\" * -x \*.html";        

        //$res = `$cmd`;
        exec($cmd, $res, $retval);
        //$res = shell_exec($cmd);
        //system($cmd, $res);
        ignore_user_abort(false);

Obviously i've commented out each that i've tried, so that I can try the next.

Anybody got any ideas how to solve this annoying problem? Maybe it is not possible to do two command (the 'cd', and 'zip') in a single PHP shell execute? But then if i did a 'cd' in one call and the 'zip' call in another - would the change of directory apply for the next external command I executed?

[herve]

Hi,

have you check the rights ? I mean : when you do it "by hand"
you are using a user account, but when you do it with PHP
you are using another account (the user/group under which
Apache is running); so may be the user of Apache have
not the same rights than when you do it manually ?

Also, double check any syntax errors (like escaping ", etc.
misplaced spaces (or missing one) are frequent errors)

Hervé.