Alternative method to capture PHP exec() output from cmd line program (rtmpdump.exe)

Question

I've used the exec() function a few times in the past to capture information from command line executables, and had intended to do this again with RTMPDump.exe. The PHP code is as follows, and works with any other cmd line examples I've used in the past, but in this case yields nothing to $output: ``` $cmd = 'c:\rtmpdump\rtmpdump -r "rtmp://fms.domain.com/live/live_800"'; exec($cmd, $output); foreach ($output as $item){ // do something with this $item } ``` I've tried it by putting the Windows command line in a .bat file, and running that, in which ase $output then contains only what was echoed in the bat file, but not the output shown below, which is what results when I run the command manually from the command line. ``` C:\rtmpdump>rtmpdump -r "rtmp://fms.domain.com/live/live_800" RTMPDump v2.3 (c) 2010 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL Connecting ... INFO: Connected... ERROR: rtmp server sent error Starting Live Stream For duration: 2.000 sec INFO: M…

Accepted Answer

Thanks to JohnF getting me on the right track, should any other novices need to accomplish this, here's how I did it using proc_open:

```
$descriptorspec = array(
0 => array("pipe", "r"),    // stdin is a pipe that the child will read from
1 => array("pipe", "w"),    // stdout is a pipe that the child will write to
2 => array("pipe", "w")     // stderr is a pipe that the child will write to
);
$cmd = c:\rtmpdump\rtmpdump -r "rtmp://fms.domain.com/live/live_800 -B 1 -m 3";
$process = proc_open($cmd, $descriptorspec, $pipes);
if (is_resource($process)) {
    $stdin = stream_get_contents($pipes[0]);
    $stdout = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
    $stderr = stream_get_contents($pipes[2]);
    fclose($pipes[0]);  fclose($pipes[1]);  fclose($pipes[2]);
    // It is important that you close any pipes before calling proc_close in order to avoid a deadlock
    $return_value = proc_close($process);   
}
```

Alternative method to capture PHP exec() output from cmd line program (rtmpdump.exe)

Solution

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