PHP: exec() error responses?

Question

Below is the command I tried executing, without success:

exec('ln -s ' . PLUGIN_DIR . '/.htaccess ' . ABSPATH . '/.htaccess');

When you add a die() at the end, it catches that there's an error:

exec('ln -s ' . PLUGIN_DIR . '/.htaccess ' . ABSPATH . '/.htaccess') or die('what?!');

For the above exec() statement, a permissions problem is causing the error, but PHP isn't displaying it. How do you display from PHP what error is occurring?

Answer 1

You can receive the output result of the exec function by passing an optional second parameter:

exec('ln -s ' . PLUGIN_DIR . '/.htaccess ' . ABSPATH . '/.htaccess',$output);
var_dump($output);