shell exec - How do I to properly handle spaces in PHP Shell_exec?

Question

I'm running on win2003 server, PHP 526, via the cmd-line.

I have a cmdline string:

$cmd = '  "d:Prog Filesfoo.exe" -p "d:data pathdatadir"  ';  

Trying to do this in php code

$out = `$cmd`;       # note use of backticks AKA shell_exec

results in a failure by foo.exe as it interprets the -p arg as "d:data".

However, the same $cdm string copied to the windows shell cmdline executes successfully.

How do I properly handle spaces in PHP shell_exec?

Answer 1

Use escapeshellarg() to escape your arguments, it should escape it with an appropriate combination of quotation marks and escaped spaces for your platform (I'm guessing you're on Windows).