PHP exec() vs system() vs passthru()

They have slightly different purposes.

• exec() is for calling a system command, and perhaps dealing with the output yourself.
• system() is for executing a system command and immediately displaying the output - presumably text.
• passthru() is for executing a system command which you wish the raw return from - presumably something binary.

Regardless, I suggest you not use any of them. They all produce highly unportable code.

The previous answers seem all to be a little confusing or incomplete, so here is a table of the differences...

+----------------+-----------------+----------------+----------------+
|    Command     | Displays Output | Can Get Output | Gets Exit Code |
+----------------+-----------------+----------------+----------------+
| system()       | Yes (as text)   | Last line only | Yes            |
| passthru()     | Yes (raw)       | No             | Yes            |
| exec()         | No              | Yes (array)    | Yes            |
| shell_exec()   | No              | Yes (string)   | No             |
| backticks (``) | No              | Yes (string)   | No             |
+----------------+-----------------+----------------+----------------+

• "Displays Output" means it streams the output to the browser (or command line output if running from a command line).
• "Can Get Output" means you can get the output of the command and assign it to a PHP variable.
• The "exit code" is a special value returned by the command (also called the "return status"). Zero usually means it was successful, other values are usually error codes.

Other misc things to be aware of:

• The shell_exec() and the backticks operator do the same thing.
• There are also proc_open() and popen() which allow you to interactively read/write streams with an executing command.
• Add "2>&1" to the command string if you also want to capture/display error messages.
• Use escapeshellcmd() to escape command arguments that may contain problem characters.
• If passing an $output variable to exec() to store the output, if $output isn't empty, it will append the new output to it. So you may need to unset($output) first.

It really all comes down to how you want to handle output that the command might return and whether you want your PHP script to wait for the callee program to finish or not.

• exec executes a command and passes output to the caller (or returns it in an optional variable).

• passthru is similar to the exec() function in that it executes a command . This function should be used in place of exec() or system() when the output from the Unix command is binary data which needs to be passed directly back to the browser.

• system executes an external program and displays the output, but only the last line.

If you need to execute a command and have all the data from the command passed directly back without any interference, use the passthru() function.

If you're running your PHP script from the command-line, passthru() has one large benefit. It will let you execute scripts/programs such as vim, dialog, etc, letting those programs handle control and returning to your script only when they are done.

If you use system() or exec() to execute those scripts/programs, it simply won't work.

Gotcha: For some reason, you can't execute less with passthru() in PHP.