I'm writing a webapp for a professor. It is basically a replacement for a csh script he wrote, along with a simple interface that will allow for dealing with input and output files. All the csh script does is automate a bunch of perl scripts.
Anyway, I chose to do it in PHP because it seemed more straightforward than doing it in perl.
So, the problem I'm having is that there is a lot of file creation and deletion, much of which is done within the scripts. When I try testing exec() and shell_exec(), the executed commands don't produce any side effects. I really need these side effects to happen. Is there any way to actually get side effects?
For example
some_php_function("touch foo.out");
echo `ls .`;
produces as output
{a bunch of stuff}
foo.out
{more stuff}
I tried using the perl in php extension, but it isn't compiling, which makes it difficult to actually use :)
Thanks