I am running CentOS 6, as httpd is executed as user 'apache'. For security reasons, I want to use sudo to be executed via exec as user 'aq':
<?php exec("/usr/bin/sudo -u aq somescript.sh",$output,$return_val);?>
With visudo I have added the following line:
apache ALL = (aq) NOPASSWD: ALL
Furthermore I temporary gave apache as login shell (/bin/bash), to be able to test
/usr/bin/sudo -u aq somescript.sh
directly which worked.
php exec fails as $return_val delivers a '1' if sudo is invoked.