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exec escapeshellarg

Last updated: Sat, 27 Jan 2007

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# escapeshellcmd

(PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5)

escapeshellcmd -- Escape shell metacharacters

## Описание

string escapeshellcmd ( string command )

escapeshellcmd() escapes any characters in a string that might be used to trick a shell command into executing arbitrary commands. This function should be used to make sure that any data coming from user input is escaped before this data is passed to the exec() or system() functions, or to the backtick operator.

Following characters are preceded by a backslash: `#&;`|*?~<>^()[]{}$\`, `\x0A` and `\xFF`. `'` and `"` are escaped only if they are not paired. In Windows, all these characters plus `%` are replaced by a space instead.

## Список параметров

`command`

  The command that will be escaped.

## Возвращаемые значения

The escaped string.

## Примеры

Пример 1. escapeshellcmd() example

`<?php
$e = escapeshellcmd($userinput);
// here we don't care if $e has spaces
system("echo $e");
$f = escapeshellcmd($filename);
// and here we do, so we use quotes
system("touch \"/tmp/$f\"; ls -l \"/tmp/$f\"");
?>`

## Смотрите также

escapeshellarg()
exec()
popen()
system()
backtick operator

add a note User Contributed Notes
escapeshellcmd
Leon
11-Feb-2007 04:31
`This function is great -- except when you need to legitimately use an escaped character as part of your command. The code below leaves the parts of the command that are enclosed within single quotes alone, but escapes the rest eg:
"echo Never use the '<blink>' tag ; cat /etc/passwd"
becomes:
"echo Never use the '<blink>' tag \; cat /etc/passwd"
and not:
"echo Never use the '\<blink\>' tag \; cat /etc/passwd"
i.e, we really want the ';' escaped, but not the HTML tag. I really needed the code below in order to run the external ImageMagick's 'convert' command properly and safely...
<?php
// Escape whole string
$cmdQ = escapeshellcmd($cmd);
// Build array of quoted parts, and the same escaped
preg_match_all('/\'[^\']+\'/', $cmd, $matches);
$matches = current($matches);
$quoted = array();
foreach( $matches as $match )
$quoted[escapeshellcmd($match)] = $match;
// Replace sections that were single quoted with original content
foreach( $quoted as $search => $replace )
$cmdQ = str_replace( $search, $replace, $cmdQ );
return $cmdQ;
?>`
abennett at clarku dot edu
05-Jul-2006 11:59
`I've got a php script that needs to pass a username and password via exec to a perl script. The problem is valid password characters were getting escaped...
Here's a little perl function I wrote to fix it.
sub unescape_string {
my $string = shift;
# all these interpolated regex's are slow, so if there's no
# backslash in the string don't bother with it
# index() is faster then a regex
if ( ! index($string,'\\\\') ) {
return $string;
}
my @characters = ('#', '&', ';', '`', '|', '*', '?', '~', '<', '>', '^', '(', ')',
'[', ']', '{', '}', '$', '\\', ',', ' ', '\x0A', '\xFF' );
my $character;
foreach $character (@characters) {
$character = quotemeta($character);
my $pattern = "\\\\(" . $character . ")";
$string =~ s/$pattern/$1/g;
}
return $string;
}
Hope this is useful.`
ceejay at trashfactory dot de
15-Mar-2006 04:43
`Well guys, i find it very hard that escapeshellarg and escapeshellcmd are forcely run when passing a command to exec, system or popen, when safe_mode is turned on.
Right now, i did not find any working solution to pass commands like this:
cmd -arg1 -arg2 "<BLA varname=\"varvalue\" varname1=\"varvalue1\" />"
it is just the case, that the parameter for arg2 which is a string that looks like an HTML-Tag with various attributes set, all attributes of the string in arg2 gets splitted by the whitespaces within. this wont happen with safe_mode turned off, so it must be one of the escapefunctions, that breaks functionality.
In order to circumvent this, i have made a temporary solution, which dynamically creates a skriptfile (by fopen), which just contains the whole command with arguments, and then execute that skriptfile. i dont like that solution, but in the other hand, safe_mode cannot be easily turned off on that server.`
cast3r
13-Sep-2005 05:31
`"normal any user on linux can view almost any directory so:
ls / -als will print a complete list of any file in the linux filesystem including its size, security and hidden files as well."
ls / -alsR is the whole filesystem.`
docey
12-Apr-2005 05:56
`the main reason for quoting a command is that it not multiple command can be joined. i don't know for sure if this is the right syntax but remeber that this can do some nice security breaks. here's one way of how to know exactly what your trying to break into for.
normal any user on linux can view almost any directory so:
ls / -als will print a complete list of any file in the linux filesystem including its size, security and hidden files as well.
now the output would only become known to php and never will the user be able to view this data unless the php script would actual start to print it out. like passtru does!! but a good php coder knows never to use passtru unless not otherwise possible.
but what would happen if you can direct the output from ls also from that same commandline to a file in the webroot most webserver still default their base-webroot to /var/www/ so storing it there in text file to download it later and you can simply take coffee while checking wich files can be read by php security mode and then simply use the cp command to copy those to the webroot and download them to your own hard-disk. without a list of the files you can only guess where to copy from! and thats harder then guessing the root password.
so if the first command was quoted it is not possible to attach another command because of a syntax error. think of all the thinks you can do once you got a complete list of every file on the filesystem. including mounted once via NFS and others. security starts at keeping the door hidden.
also another nice command for hanging the webserver can be "php <?php while(true){ exec('ls / -als'); }; ?>" this keeps creating a file list on the entire filesystem wich not only keeps the hard-disk(s) bussy but also memory and cpu wich must store the returned list. so keeping in mind not all command accepted from users can be used blind.
actualy never accept any command from external sources only proven built-in predefined commands should be executed.`
trisk at earthling dot net
31-Jan-2005 10:19
`This function does not work as shown in the php.net examples.
If you put your encoded filename into double-quotes as they suggest, then it will break on certain characters in filenames, such as ampersand.
For example if you have a filename called "foo & bar.jpg" and you use this function on it, your resulting filename when double-quoted will produce this and not be found:
"foo \& bar.jpg"
If you need to have a single argument where spaces are included then do not use this function with added double-quotes, use escapeshellarg() which encloses the whole string in single quotes.
I do not understand which purpose this particular function is intended for. I can't see any use for it, unless you pass it through another function and convert spaces " " to "\ ", which would allow you to use the string directly on the command line.`
add a note
exec escapeshellarg

Last updated: Sat, 27 Jan 2007
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