PHP to Powershell using shell_exec

If I run:

$output = shell_exec('powershell "get-service "dhcp""'); 

I get perfect output of the service dhcp showing running but if I run:

$output = shell_exec('powershell "get-user "testing""'); 

I get nothing.

I don't see any difference in what Im doing here - and why get-service would work but get-user would not. If I run it in cmd it works perfectly. Any ideas?

I believe the issues might be that apache is running the command and does not have permissions. Could th开发者_JAVA百科is be the case? Does apache run as a different user? If so it doesn't have access to do this.

Try redirecting the error output to the standard output to see if you can see an error.

$output = shell_exec('powershell "get-user "testing" 2>&1"'); 

This snippet taken from http://www.aboutdebian.com/nettools.txt

//Normally, the shell_exec function does not report STDERR messages. 
//The   "2>&1"          option tells the system 
//to pipe STDERR to STDOUT so if there is an error, we can see it.
$fp = shell_exec("$command 2>&1");

exec() and shell_exec() are not very verbose by nature. exec() allows you to set a third variable and get the execution status, but failures are mostly assigned "1" and you have no way of knowing if it was a permissions error, if the binary is not executable etc.

Enter a project that allows PHP to obtain and interact dynamically with a real Powershell. Get it here: https://github.com/merlinthemagic/MTS

After downloading you would simply use the following code:

$shellObj    = \MTS\Factories::getDevices()->getLocalHost()->getShell('powershell');

$strCmd1   = 'get-user "testing"';
$return1  = $shellObj->exeCmd($strCmd1);

The return will give you the command return OR error from powershell, just as if you sat at the console. Furthermore, you can issue any command you like against the $shellObj, the environment is maintained throughout the life of the PHP script. So instead of bundling commands in a script file, just issue them one by one using the exeCmd() method, that way you can also handle the return and any exceptions.