Need help with shell_exec

j_70

I am trying to create a .pdf from a series of .tiff images. What images are selected is the product of a query (from Oracle), not a pick-list or traditional means. This is running on Linux so two tools at my disposal are CPTIFF which puts several .tiff images into one file and TIFF2PDF, which takes the output of CPTIFF and creates a .pdf from it. The use of the app will always produce a pdf with multiple images.

What I need to be able to do is feed the result of the query to CPTIFF and then the result of CPTIFF to TIFF2PDF. Something like:

shell_exec('cptiff image1.tiff image2.tiff image3.tiff all_images.tif');
shell_exec('tiff2pdf -o output.pdf all_images.tif');

The problem: How do I feed the query result to cptiff as a single line separated by blanks. I am used to looping through and creating a table as output, not feeding the results to the OS.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 🙂

thorpe

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
  $tmp .= $row['tiff']." ";
}
$tmp = rtrim($tmp);
shell_exec("cptiff $tmp");

Weedpacket

Well, the line is just a string like any other. Presuming you can get an array of strings, one .tiff filename per string, it's just a [man]join[/man].

j_70

For some reason the following command is not working. It works from the command line, but not PHP. It is simply a test but does not work. Any ideas?

shell_exec('tiffcp /root/imgtest/image20.tiff test.tiff');

thorpe

Are there any errors? What is the file permissions for tiffcp?

j_70

tiffcp is: -rwxr-xr-x to it is executable by everyone and the image files are: -rw-r--r-- so they are readable by everyone.

samudasu

Your problem is here: 'tiffcp /root/imgtest/image20.tiff test.tiff'

You're trying to do an operation in the /root directory. Php/apache doesn't have rwx access in /root. The reason you can do it from the command line is because you're probably logged in as root (so you have access to the /root dir) and the php cli is running as user root.