Question

as the problem states..
when i do

exec("ls -ltr  > output.txt 2>&1",$result,$status);

its different from the normal output. An extra column gets added. something like

-rw-r--r-- 1 apache   apache    211 Jul  1 15:52 withoutsudo.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 apache   apache      0 Jul  1 15:53 withsudo.txt

where as when executed from the command prompt its like

-rw-r--r-- 1 apache   apache    211 2010-07-01 15:52 withoutsudo.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 apache   apache    274 2010-07-01 15:53 withsudo.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 apache   apache    346 2010-07-01 15:55 sudominusu.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 apache   apache    414 2010-07-01 15:58 sudominusu.txt

See the difference. So in the first output , my usual awk ‘{print $8}’ fails.
I was facing the same problem with cron. But solved it by calling

./$HOME/.bashrc

in the script. But not happening using php. If somehow i can “tell” php to “exec” from the usual environment. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I guess you are only interested in the file names and you want to sort with reverse time.
Try this:

ls -tr1 > output.txt 2>&1

You’ll get a list with only the file names, so you don’t need awk at all.

Another solution is to specify the time format with “–time-style iso”. Have a look at the man page