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exec() problem


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Hi all,

I'm having problems with exec().

I'm trying to execute a shell script that executes psql command to dump results to a CSV file.

exec('/bin/sh /path/csv.sh pass some value');

csv.sh executes

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql -d dbname -u user -f /path/output.postgresql --set pass --set some --value

(output.postgresql is the file that has some queries to output the results of a select statement to an output CSV file.)

while this works on my local machine (Intel Mac OS X 10.4, Apache 2.2, PHP 4.4.3) it fails to run on FreeBSD (Apache 1.3, PHP 4.4.2).

it seems like the user "nobody" running the Apache Web Server is failing to run the commands using the exec() function. I'm guessing that the reason why it's failing is that the psql is asking for a password, but I cannot place the .pgpass file since nobody has no home directory.

Also I haven't tried the NOPASSWD for nobody in sudoers file. I'm not sure if this is a good idea since apache can then run any sh and psql commands from exec().

Any ideas??
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Hi,

The shell_exec() is the same; it works on my machine but not on their server.

The site is not hosted on the shared hosting server (my client has their own server at their data center.) so we can ask them to configure the Apache, PHP, and PostgreSQL, only if I can figure out the way to fix the problem....

What is the option to disable exec() / shell_exec()? Is it the safe_mode option? or is there a PHP configure option that has to be added to use these functions at comile?
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I'm not 100% sure, safe_mode would be the first to check, then you'll need to check the permissions of the apache process or php-cgi file, and that it has access to execute /bin/sh. There may be other directives in php.ini.

Btw, the reason I suggested shell_exec() is so you can echo what the command returns.

Another option is to pg_lo_export().
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Hi,

PHP.net manual stated that the exec() and other program execution functions are included in the core of PHP, so there is no extra installation is needed.

exec() can also returns the output results.

$result = exec("some comand", $output);

$result contains the last result only while $output contains all of results returned by executing the command.

... and on my client's sever, it does not return anything (but my local machine does.)
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Using the pg_query() to select 50,000 records and fwrite() to write results to a text file only took a couple of seconds to run, so I'm switching to do that instead of using exec()....

Thanks

P.S. I modified the previous post since I was doing wrong (for some reasons, I was forlooping select statement 50,000 times. no wonder the script timed out....)
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