When doing something like
$output = shell_exec("command 2>&1");
collecting the command's stdout & stderr in $output, is there a way to find the command's exit status?
One could write the command output to a temp file and then append the exit status, but that's rather clunky. Any better suggestions?
As you've already seen, when using shell_exec you have to chain your "real" command with echo $? to get the exit status:
$output_including_status = shell_exec("command 2>&1; echo $?");
but if you want the clean way, then you want to use the exec function, which allows a 3rd agument explicitly for this purpose.
Following worked for me with exec() to show the output
exec(your_command, $output, $return_var);
var_dump($output);
var_dump($return_var);
