ExecTask should return command output as a property (different from passthru)

[anonymous]

I'm writing a Web control panel for basic operating system commands, so I constantly need to parse up output of 'ls', 'grep', 'ifconfig' and the like. There is currently no way to return the output of an ExecTask. This is virtually unneeded for normal phing usage, but it is highly desirable for embedded phing applications.

I have supplied a patch to add a simple output property that closely mirrors the "returnProperty"

example usage:

<target name="extendedstatus">

<exec command="/etc/init.d/httpd extendedstatus" outputProperty="command.out"/>

</target>

Then the application which starts the target can access the "command.out" property and deal with it.

[anonymous]

patch to add output property to system exec task

[anonymous]

ticket should have been labelled "enhancement"

[anonymous]

With the patch submitted, doing:

<exec command="echo Hello; echo World" outputProperty="cmd_output"/>
<echo msg="Output: ${cmd_output}"/>

Results in:

[exec] Executing command: echo Hello; echo World 2>&1
[echo] Output: Array

Rather than:

[exec] Executing command: echo Hello; echo World 2>&1
[echo] Output: Hello
World

The fix for this is to change the added setProperty line from:

$this->project->setProperty($this->outputProperty, $output);

to:

$this->project->setProperty($this->outputProperty, implode("\n", $output));

(Assuming multi-line cmd output should remain multi-line)

[anonymous]

Currently, I only hand off the returned property back to controlling PHP scripts. I don't use the command later in the build file.

But, I don't see a problem with this. My controlling script could just as easily explode the $output back into an array if necessary. I was just trying to modify phing as little as possible.

[mrook]

(In [513]) Refs #300 - ExecTask should return command output as a property

[mrook]

The patch was applied, with the addition of the implode() call. Thanks!