What methods can be used in PHP to interact with external programs and exchange variables?

To interact with external programs and exchange variables in PHP, you can use methods like exec(), shell_exec(), passthru(), or proc_open(). These functions allow you to execute external commands, capture their output, and pass variables between your PHP script and the external program. 

// Example using exec() to interact with an external program and exchange variables
$command = 'ls -la';
$output = [];
exec($command, $output);

// Display the output of the external program
foreach ($output as $line) {
    echo $line . "<br>";
}

Keywords

exec shell_exec system passthru popen

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