[Pugged] php system() command

[Dave J. Hala Jr.]

Steve, R U really a Vorlon?


On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 13:15, Steve Langasek wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 05:38:02PM -0000, dave@visionary.com wrote:
> > I'm trying to run an external command for a pdf generator - it's the
> > Fytek "pdffile". We have an app that uses the win32 version. They
> > recently released a Linux version and we're trying to port it over.
> 
> > The Fytek people don't know much about linux... their app is written in
> > Perl, and they used PerlApp to "compile" it into a binary.
> 
> > I can run the "pdffile" binary from the command line and it generates
> > PDF's just fine.
> 
> > I'm attempting to do it from PHP using this:
> 
> > <?
> > system("pdffile source.rpt output.pdf");
> > ?>
> 
> > I think the problem is that the binary is trying to use /root/tmp for
> > it's temporary files. Apache is running as nobody, and nobody can't
> > write to /root/tmp. (That doesn't sound grammatically correct...)
> 
> > I've tried variations of this script with putting the full path in and
> > such... but here's the general idea:
> 
> > #!/bin/bash
> > export TMP=/tmp
> > ./pdffile $1 $2
> 
> > Again, I can run this from the cmd line and it works.
> 
> > Any ideas on this?
> 
> Best solution: fix the TMPDIR setting in Apache's environment, so that it
> doesn't think it should be using /root/tmp to begin with.  This ought to
> be as simple as an 'unset TMPDIR' in your system's Apache startup script.
> 
> I don't know why they suggested changing a variable named 'TMP'; the
> canonical Unix variable is 'TMPDIR'.
> 
> Steve Langasek
> postmodern programmer