Question

I need to do an exec command that applies to several files, but it’s not working. I’m going to create an EXAMPLE to show this. Obviously, I don’t need anything of this directory and I do the example with “ls” command, although happens with any other command:

exec("ls -al /etc/security/", $output);
print_r($output);

Array
(
    [0] => total 40
    [1] => drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Jan 27  2010 .
    [2] => drwxr-xr-x 83 root root 4096 Feb 24 12:38 ..
    [3] => -rw-r--r--  1 root root 4266 Apr  9  2008 access.conf
    [4] => -rw-r--r--  1 root root 3551 Apr  9  2008 group.conf
    [5] => -rw-r--r--  1 root root 1911 Apr  9  2008 limits.conf
    [6] => -rw-r--r--  1 root root 1507 Apr  9  2008 namespace.conf
    [7] => -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  977 Apr  9  2008 namespace.init
    [8] => -rw-------  1 root root    0 Jan 27  2010 opasswd
    [9] => -rw-r--r--  1 root root 2980 Apr  9  2008 pam_env.conf
    [10] => -rw-r--r--  1 root root 2180 Apr  9  2008 time.conf
)

But trying with more files …

exec("ls -al /etc/security/{access.conf,group.conf}", $output);
print_r($output);

ls: cannot access /etc/security/{access.conf,group.conf}: No such file or directory

Of course this works in console:

$ ls -al /etc/security/{access.conf,group.conf}
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4266 2008-04-09 15:25 /etc/security/access.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3551 2008-04-09 15:25 /etc/security/group.conf

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments, this is a problem of the shell expanding the {} shorthand, which does not happen in a PHP environment. You’ll have to supply the full paths separately:

exec('ls -al /etc/security/access.conf /etc/security/group.conf', $output);