As said before, only the machine that is running PHP can run programs, not the client machine. But you don't make it clear if you want to run programs on the client or server side. If you want to have PHP run programs in your own machine, as a scripting tool, you should use inverted quotation marks:
<?php `c:\windows\calc.exe` ?>
That will invoke Windows calculator. You can also use COM to invoke MS Word:
<? // this script invokes Word
$word=new COM("word.application") or die("Cannot start MS Word");
print "Loaded word version ($word->Version)\n";
$word->visible = 1 ;
$word->Documents->Add();
$word->Selection->Typetext("This is a test");
?>
But I don't know how to pass commands to the program. I guess the last line in the script above is supposed to make Word print "this is a test", but it didn't work with me. If you find out how to pass commands to a program, please tell me.
Luciano
