What potential security risks are involved in using shell_exec to interact with game servers in PHP?

Using shell_exec to interact with game servers in PHP can pose security risks such as command injection vulnerabilities if user input is not properly sanitized. To mitigate this risk, it is essential to validate and sanitize any user input before passing it to shell_exec. This can be achieved by using functions like escapeshellarg() or escapeshellcmd() to escape special characters.

$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$escaped_input = escapeshellarg($user_input);
$output = shell_exec("your_command_here $escaped_input");
echo $output;