ls -l grep 'keyword' and get result into php var

Question

root@ubuntu:/srv/www/web.domain.com/public_html# ls -l | grep 'aria2'
-rw-r--r--   1 nginx nginx      201 Aug 26 14:40 M010102.aria2
-rw-r--r--   1 nginx nginx     1313 Aug 26 14:41 [Heido] Hamasaki.aria2
-rw-r--r--   1 nginx nginx      125 Aug 26 14:41 [Riycou] K-Project [MP4 AAC 720p].aria2

I did the following

ls -l | grep 'aria2'

I wanna do this at PHP, i will probably

shell_exec("ls -l | grep 'aria2');

Problem is how do I record the return result into a php array

M010102.aria2 [Heido] Hamasaki.aria2 [Heido] Hamasaki.aria2

Thanks!!

You could try http://ca1.php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php and use 2nd argument as return array — Dexa, Aug 26 '14 at 14:46
why not just preg_split the result string by the line break or a regex that accounts for the spaces between the first 8 columns — Rooster, Aug 26 '14 at 15:06

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 02 '19 at 10:57

4

As per the official documentation for shell_exec, the output is the return value of the function:

<?php
  $output = shell_exec('ls -lart');
  echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
?>

RichardBernards' comment is correct. If you wish to have the output as an array, you can use the exec($command, &$output) function instead. Read the official documentation for further information.

edited Mar 02 '19 at 10:57

ashleedawg

20,365
9
72
105

answered Aug 26 '14 at 14:48

CarCzar

140
12

I think shell_exec returns a string... exec() however returns an array with rows for array-items – RichardBernards Aug 26 '14 at 14:50

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 26 '14 at 15:02

Why not just use PHP's glob()? It will return you an array of files:

$files = glob('*.aria2');

This is roughly the equivalent of the shell command ls *.aria2.

By the way, as a general piece of advice, parsing ls (by piping it to grep, for example) is frowned upon.

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:17

You could use PHP commands to accomplish the same thing:

<?php
$directory = getcwd();
$scanned_directory = array_diff(scandir($directory), array('..', '.'));
$result = preg_grep("/^.*\.aria2$/i",$scanned_directory);
foreach ($result as $value){
        echo $value,'<br>';
}
?>

More details:

Checking for file-extensions in PHP with Regular expressions

http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-grep.php

http://php.net/manual/en/function.scandir.php

ls -l grep 'keyword' and get result into php var

3 Answers3