RE: [PHP] Re: CLI script & exec() - how to control what gets dumped on the screen.

> my fault was indeed thinking along such 'the result' lines - I did > not consider that stderr was not part of 'the result' and that most > programs seem to happily spit out their output to stderr (e.g. apache2ctl, > cvs, mysql to name a few that I was calling in the problem script) and yes > I'm still rather baffled as to why something like apache2ctl would > dump the string 'Syntax OK' to stderr - if ever there was some > user feedback > that *didn't* represent an error it would be 'Syntax OK'. > I agree that this may seem a bit strange at first. My understanding however, is that stderr is used for errors and diagnostic info; stdout is used for output to be seen by a user. The confusion seems to arise from the fact that when using the *nix command line, stderr and stdout are almost always both set as the terminal window. I think it would be helpful if the manual page for exec said that on *nix, it only captures stdout (although this is mentioned in the corresponding user comments). Edward