Question

I have a PHP script that needs to execute programmes that will work on files that have spaces in the names. Most PHP functions for executing external commands (e.g. exec()) take an 1 string argument for the command line to execute. However then you have to do things like escapeshellarg() to make your input safe.

Is there some way to execute an external command in PHP with an array. So rather than:

exec("ls -l ".escapeshellarg($filename));

I can go:

exec(array("ls", "-l", $filename));

This would mean I don’t have to worry about escaping the arguments. I want to avoid using escapeshellarg(), since the version I am using has a bug that strips out non-ASCII characters.

Java has this functionality http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/Runtime.html#exec%28java.lang.String%5B%5D%29

Answer 1

Sounds like this isn’t possible with PHP’s builtin functions.