What are the limitations of PHP in accessing system tools and user information in a web server context?

PHP has limitations in accessing system tools and user information in a web server context due to security concerns. To address this issue, you can use PHP's built-in functions to interact with the system in a safe and controlled manner, such as using the escapeshellarg() function to escape shell arguments and prevent command injection attacks.

$command = 'ls -l';
$escaped_command = escapeshellarg($command);
$output = shell_exec($escaped_command);
echo $output;