What are some best practices for securely executing external programs with user-defined parameters in PHP?

When executing external programs with user-defined parameters in PHP, it is crucial to sanitize and validate the input to prevent injection attacks or unintended behavior. One way to securely execute external programs is to use escapeshellarg() or escapeshellcmd() functions to escape user input before passing it to the external program. 

$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$escaped_input = escapeshellarg($user_input);

$command = "external_program $escaped_input";
$output = shell_exec($command);

echo $output;

Keywords

PHP security external programs user-defined parameters execution

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