What are the potential risks of using PHP functions like "escapeshellarg" and "exec" on web servers?

The potential risks of using PHP functions like "escapeshellarg" and "exec" on web servers include vulnerability to command injection attacks, where an attacker can execute arbitrary commands on the server. To mitigate this risk, it is important to properly sanitize user input and use functions like "escapeshellarg" to escape special characters before passing them to the "exec" function. 

$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$escaped_input = escapeshellarg($user_input);
$output = exec("some_command $escaped_input");

Keywords

PHP escapeshellarg exec web servers risks

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