What are some common pitfalls when using PHP to interact with external programs or scripts?

One common pitfall when using PHP to interact with external programs or scripts is not properly sanitizing user input, which can lead to security vulnerabilities such as command injection attacks. To mitigate this risk, always validate and sanitize user input before passing it to external programs. 

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

// Use the validated input in your command execution
$output = shell_exec("external_program $validated_input");

// Further processing of the output

Keywords

shell_exec system escapeshellarg popen backticks

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