awk - How to open a terminal window in php

Question

I need to extract some data form a .log file. I'm doing this with awk and it works fine - but now I want to save awk results into a variable. I need to open a terminal window via php and do this command in order to get what I need:

cat apache_access.log | awk '{print $1}'

But I don't know how to do this. Can anybody tell me how to open a connection to php and how to save the result of this command in a variable?

Answer 1

Please refer to the exec function.

Example:

<?php
// outputs the username that owns the running php/httpd process
// (on a system with the "whoami" executable in the path)
echo exec('whoami');
?>