CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmllinux
kirchner20
kirchner20

Reputation: 97

Using Linux awk command in php

Good Day All I'm having a problem getting this command to work on button press I need to search through a file and output the results in comma delimited text. PHP doesnt seem to like the curly brackets so as far as I could read I need to use exec(), but to no avail as the error I recieve is "syntax error, unexpected T_LNUMBER, expecting T_VARIABLE or '$'" I'm still new to php so sorry if the answer is obvious! Any info will be helpful, Thanks

<html>
<body>
<h1>Linux Command Test</h1>

<form method="POST" action="">
<input type="submit" id="submit" name="submit" value="Submit"/>
</form>

<?php
 if (isset($_POST['submit']))
  {
     $output = exec('grep -i hello test.txt | awk -v OFS=, '{\$1=\$1;print}' > newtest.txt');
     echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
  }
 ?>


</body>
</html>

Upvotes: 1

Views: 8845

Answers (3)

Barmar
Barmar

Reputation: 781741

$output = exec('grep -i hello test.txt | awk -v OFS=, '{\$1=\$1;print}' > newtest.txt');

should be:

$output = exec('awk -v OFS=, \'/hello/i {$1=$1;print}\' test.txt > newtest.txt');

You need to escape the quotes, otherwise they delimit the PHP string. You don't need to escape $ inside single-quoted strings in PHP. You shouldn't redirect the awk output to a file if you want to capture it in a PHP variable.

And there's no need to pipe grep to awk, since awk has built-in pattern matching.

Upvotes: 2

timstermatic
timstermatic

Reputation: 1740

try escaping the $

grep -i hello test.txt | awk -v OFS=, '{\$1=\$1;print}' > newtest.txt

Upvotes: 3

Marcin Orlowski
Marcin Orlowski

Reputation: 75645

There are bunch of functions you can use in PHP to invoke external applications, exec(), system() etc: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.exec.php but mind that it's up to administrator to let you use them. On most shared hostings these functions are disabled

Upvotes: 0

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