Calling Perl script from PHP and passing in variables, while also using variablized perl script name

Question

I normally call perl scripts from PHP as below and pass in variables this way, and it works fine, however now I am building a component for re-use where I want to also varia

Answer 1

Your way is not working because you are concatenating all the parameters without spaces, effectively making them one parameter.

Try

$perlscript_file = "/var/www/other_scripts/perl/apps/$perlscript.pl $var1 $var2 $var3 $var4";

By the way, if the parameters are coming from an external source, you MUST sanitize them using escapeshellarg(). The same goes for $perlscript - if it comes from an external source or even user input, do a escapeshellcmd() on it.

Answer 2

In your second code, you're concatenating the variables without spaces between them. You should consider using sprintf to format this nicely:

$script = sprintf('/var/www/other_scripts/perl/apps/%s.pl %s %s %s %s', $perlscript, $var1, $var2, $var3, $var4);

Answer 3

On a sidenote, there is a CPAN package that aims to provide a bridge between PHP and Perl, which would allow you to do something like the following in PHP:

$perl = Perl::getInstance();
$instance = $perl->new('perlclass', @args);

Not sure how stable this is though. See

• PHP::Interpreter
• Integrating PHP and Perl

If you are using Apache, you can also use

// PHP
apache_note('foo', 'bar');
virtual("/perl/some_script.pl");
$result = apache_note("resultdata");

# Perl
my $r = Apache->request()->main();
my $foo = $r->notes('foo');
$r->notes('resultdata', somethingWithFoo($foo));

See http://php.net/manual/en/function.apache-note.php