Question

My PHP web app receives data from a stream. Once the page is loaded I need to open an .exe file using system() or exec() and after short period of time new data will come, so I must type specific command to this .exe to get its returned value, how can I do this?

I’m only able to do this manually in command prompt

path/to/.exe :: hit 'Enter'
command1 params1
//...

Answer 1

What you’re looking for is proc_open(). http://php.net/manual/en/function.proc-open.php

This will allow you to work with STDIO streams to communicate with the separate process.

Example from the PHP documentation:

$descriptorspec = array(
   0 => array("pipe", "r"),  // stdin is a pipe that the child will read from
   1 => array("pipe", "w"),  // stdout is a pipe that the child will write to
   2 => array("file", "/tmp/error-output.txt", "a") // stderr is a file to write to
);

$cwd = '/tmp';
$env = array('some_option' => 'aeiou');

$process = proc_open('php', $descriptorspec, $pipes, $cwd, $env);

if (is_resource($process)) {
    // $pipes now looks like this:
    // 0 => writeable handle connected to child stdin
    // 1 => readable handle connected to child stdout
    // Any error output will be appended to /tmp/error-output.txt

    fwrite($pipes[0], '<?php print_r($_ENV); ?>');
    fclose($pipes[0]);

    echo stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
    fclose($pipes[1]);

    // It is important that you close any pipes before calling
    // proc_close in order to avoid a deadlock
    $return_value = proc_close($process);

    echo "command returned $return_value\n";
}