I'm working on interfacing a microcontroller with a lamp server. I am trying to run the command echo -e -n "data \r" > /dev/ttyUSB0 using shell_exec in php but with no results. It works just fine from the command line. Doing a little experimenting, I discovered that echo -e -n "1 \r" actually echoes -e -n 1. Is there a reason it won't take the -e or -n options?
Here's my code:
<?php
shell_exec('echo -e -n "1 \r" > /dev/ttyUSB0');
?>
Instead of using shell_exec and echo, why not use PHP's filesystem functions?
file_put_contents('/dev/ttyUSB0', "1 \r");
There are some other functions too, try this function maybe you get your answer.
exec(command, $output);
This function takes a command and assigns to $output an array where each element is a line of the generated output.
I ran into similar problem, calling from php
php > echo shell_exec("echo -e aaa\tbbb");
-e aaa bbb
note, that output contains "-e", while I have expected that 'echo' command will interpret -e as flag and would not send it to output.
After doing some investigation I came to following conclusion:
This is an old question but it goes what worked for me in case someone else comes across with this as well.
Yesterday night I've messing around and struggling with this myself. For this to work, the command you need to use should start by calling the echo bin directly /bin/echo... instead of only echo.
Also don't forget to use single quote /bin/echo... instead of double quote to avoid PHP null byte detection error (this part you did correctly).
I had a similar problem running with -e, I was trying to change the password from a php
running this didnt work
exec("echo -e \"$pass\\n$pass\" | passwd $user");
It said passwords dont match. Checking the echo i saw that -e was includes as a part of the echoing so i changed it to
exec("echo \"$pass\\n$pass\" | passwd $user");
And then it worked.
