Question

If I use PHP’s popen command to execute a script, does is execute it in the context of PHP’s current directory?

Currently I am doing something along the lines of

popen(' cd PATH; CMD');

but can I do it as

chdir ('PATH');
popen('CMD');

Answer 1

It depends on the context in which it’s run.

When I use popen() from the command line, it runs in the WD that I ran it from.

[ghoti@pc ~]$ php -r '$h=popen("pwd","r"); print fread($h, 80);'
/home/ghoti
[ghoti@pc ~]$ php -r 'chdir("/tmp"); $h=popen("pwd","r"); print fread($h, 80);'
/tmp