Executing a shell command within PHP

Question

On the terminal, I run this successfully within the web application's directory:

pdftohtml -c -noframes "documents/document1.pdf"

Now I want to do this through PHP, so I wrote a shell.sh file that looks like this:

sudo pdftohtml -c -noframes "documents/$file"
exit 0

Then I wrote this in php:

$output = shell_exec("file='document1.pdf' shell.sh");

It doesn't work, I expect to see html files generated, but I get some empty html files..since the command worked fine through the terminal, then I think the problem is in the way I execute it from php

echoing $output doesn't show anything.. what do I do wrong?

Answer 1

You need specify path to the script (or ./ if it is the current directory):

shell_exec("file='document1.pdf' ./shell.sh")