Using PHP to recursively zip the contents of your site for backups

[alex_t_king]

From what I understand, I need to tarball the top level directory, then gzip the tarball... unfortunately I don't know how to do this.

Are there functions I can call to do this? I really did look, but I haven't found any information of use yet.

I assume the other option (I'm on a linux box) is to call the commands directly on the box. How do you call command line apps from within PHP? I have some code to do this from Perl, but I'm not as comfortable with Perl as I am with PHP.

If anyone has any experience with this, I'd appreciate any advice you can give.

Thanks.