Question

I have this PHP code that refuses to work when called from the browser, but when I run it from Putty it works just fine:

exec('rdiff patch "/full-path/file-1.bin" "/full-path/file-2.bin" "/full-path/output.bin"');

I double checked folder permission (nobody:nobody 0777), rdiff running permissions (set to root:root 0755, I changed them to nobody:nobody 0777 but it didn’t work), I even changed files permissions to 0777 / “CHOWNed them” to nobody, it didn’t work at all

I’m pretty sure it’s nothing, only I can’t figure out what’s wrong, I’m using a standard amazon unix EC2 instance

Answer 1

rdiff may very well not be in the PATH for the user the web server is running as.

Always use the full path to executables when not running them interactively, e.g. /usr/bin/rdiff or whatever which rdiff tells you in PuTTY.