Question

I’ve been fighting with this for a few hours now, and I can’t seem to work it out.
tried exec(), shell_exec(), and system(). Nothing works.
I have this:

exec("/usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/shell/send.php >> /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/shell/paging.log &");

send.php simply has:

echo 'works';

But nothing shows up in the log. I’ve googled and read stuff on here, but I can’t find anything to help.

I’m running php v.5.3.8.
safe mode is on
I’m pretty sure that is the path to php, but can’t really find out how to find it, so I’m going on phpinfo().

exec(‘whoami’); does nothing. Is it suppose to show in the browser? or email you something?
any ideas?

Answer 1

According to PHP Manual for exec function:

When safe mode is enabled, you can only execute files within the
safe_mode_exec_dir. For practical reasons, it is currently not allowed
to have .. components in the path to the executable.

Check http://php.net/manual/en/ini.sect.safe-mode.php#ini.safe-mode-exec-dir

Also, be aware that the web server user must have permission to write in the log file.

EDIT: To turn safe mode off, check not only php.ini file but also virtual hosts specific configurations in your web server, whether it is Apache, NginX or other. If you use Plesk, look in vhosts for httpd.include, and make sure that safe_mode is set to off there as well.