Nadav and the wonders of the web

Using PHP to run system command on the server side can come in very useful in many occasions.
Some examples:

• Using an online storage service for your site that doesn’t give you shell access.
• Running this during an application logic.

I will give here the main idea of this technique and a few code examples of useful commands to use with it.

Downloading a file to the server:
When I upgrade my WordPress installation I don’t want to download all the files to my personal PC and then re-upload them to the server so what I do is, I use this command to download the files:

<?php system(‘wget http://url-to-download-location/filename.zip’); ?>

Then I unzip the file using this command:

<?php system(‘unzip -o filename.zip’); ?>

The -o means it will overwrite existing files without asking so I would use that one with caution. be warned.

As you probably gathered by now the way to run system commands from php is very simple, just put the code:

<?php system(‘command’); ?>

And that is it. all you have to do now is go to your browser and access the URL of the php file.

http://yoursite/yourPHPfile.php

And the command will run =]

’till next time, have a good one =]

Nadav…