CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpajaxsocketscommand-lineterminal
Dan Lugg
Dan Lugg

Reputation: 20612

PHP CLI + Ajax for web terminal

I'm trying to determine the best approach to providing an Ajax based terminal using PHP. I haven't made an attempt at writing it yet but having rolled the idea around, the only way I could see it possible, would be 2 scripts:

There are multiple holes I can see in this though, and I'm wondering if anyone has created/seen a set of scripts that can perform these tasks? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks :)

Edit: I think I was unclear about a few things. I've found a few scripts that imitate terminals, providing nearly the functionality that I'm looking for, such as AjaxPHPTerm (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ajaxphpterm/)

The problem is that, I'm trying to find a method that permits interaction with shell scripts. If a script prompts Press any key to continue, or Select option [x], using AjaxPHPTerm, it just hangs or drops out of the shell script.

That's why I started thinking sockets, or streams; some way of forming a direct I/O stream to the system calls.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1975

Answers (2)

b0fh
b0fh

Reputation: 1735

The problem seems to be that AjaxPHPTerm is actually closer to a shell than a terminal (glancing at the code, it seems to do its own CWD handling, and has a simple read-eval-print loop).

Assuming a Posix-compatible OS on the server, the proper way to implement this would probably be to use the pseudo-terminal facility, so that your web terminal appears like a virtual terminal on the system, that running programs can interactively access.

Upvotes: 1

smentek
smentek

Reputation: 2884

Http is stateless and AJAX, sockets or any other technology based on pages generated by server will not change it magically. Whatever tricks You would use, it will be not efficient and simply not worth the effort (In my opinion at least).

Upvotes: 1

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