passing URL variables to exec() with php

You could do something like:

exec("./example.php '".addslashes(serialize($_GET))."');

And then in example.php do something like this:

count($_GET) == 0 && $_GET = unserialize(stripslashes($_SERVER['argv'][1]))

The main issue with that is that ?ex_pid is GET data which is generally associated with either including the file or accessing it through a browser. If you were including the file or accessing it from a web browser this would be trivial, but running it as CLI, your only option would be to pass it as an argument, unfortunately. You can pass it as ex_pid=123 and just parse that data, but it would still need to be passed as an argument but doing that you could use parse_str() to parse it.

Depending on what the script does, you could call lynx to call the actual page with the get data attached and generate a hash for an apikey required to make it run. Not sure if that is an option, but it is another way to do it how you want.

Hope that helps!

I had a real problem with this and couldn't get it to work running something like example.php?variable=1.

I could however get an individual file to run using the exec command, without the ?variable=1 at the end.

What I decided to do was dynamically change the contents of a template file , depending on the variables I wanted to send. This file is called template.php and contains all the code you would normally run as a $_GET. Instead of using $_GET, set the value of the variable right at the top. This line of code is then searched and replaced with any value you choose.

I then saved this new file and ran that instead.

In the following example I needed to change an SQL query - the template file has the line $sql="ENTER SQL CODE HERE";. I also needed to change the value of a a variable at the top. The line in template.php is $myvar=999999; The code below changes these line in template.php to the new values.

//Get the base file to modify - template.php
$contents=file_get_contents("template.php");
$sql="SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE foo='".$bar."'";

$contents=str_replace("ENTER SQL CODE HERE",$sql,$contents);
//Another search
$contents=str_replace("999999",$bar,$contents);

$filename="run_standalone_code".$bar.".php";

//If the file doesnt't exist, create it
if(!file_exists($filename)){
file_put_contents($filename, $contents);
}

//Now run this file
$cmd="/usr/local/bin/php ".$filename." >/dev/null &";
exec($cmd);

I had completely forgotten about this question until @Andrew Waugh commented on it (and I got an email reminder).

Anyways, this question stemmed from a misunderstanding as to how the $argv array is communicated to the script when using CLI. You can pretty much use as many arguments as you need. The way I accomplish this now is like:

if (isset($argv)) {
    switch ($argv[1]) {
        case "a_distinguishing_name_goes_here":
            $pid = $argv[2];
            sample_function($pid);
            break;
        case "another_name_goes_here":
            do_something_else($argv[2]);
            break;
    }
}