using PHP to display output from a perl script

Question

I'm new to PHP and I have a working perl script that basically logs into remote servers, cats a log file and displays certain log file information to STDOUT.

I want to make this now viewable as a web page, hence looking at PHP to display this output. I just want to view the same output as I see on the terminal for now. The goal would be then to improve the formatting/presentation of this data.

Also, any ideas/examples on best approach to format the output via PHP would be great. Thanks!!

Here is the perl script: (executed by passing some arguments)

Usage: ./statsinfo.pl Jul 26 2010 /var/log/server.log server1

my($mon,$day,$year,$file,$server) = @ARGV;
my $regex_flag = 0;                 
splice(@ARGV, 0, 4, ());            
foreach my $server ( @ARGV ) {     
    print "===================================================================================\n";
    print "REPORTING SUMMARY for BACKUP SERVER : $server\n"; 
    open(my $fh,"ssh $server cat $file |") or die "can't open log $server:$file: $!\n";
    while (my $line = <$fh>) {
        if ($line =~ m/.* $mon $day \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2} $year:.*(ERROR:|backup-date=|backup-size=|backup-time=|backup-status)/) {
            print $line;
            $regex_flag=1; 
        }
    } #end while loop
        if ($regex_flag==0) { 
           print "NOTHING TO REPORT FOR $server: $mon $day $year \n";
        }
    $regex_flag=0; 
    close($fh);
}

Answer 1

use: exec( "your command (execute perl script)" , $output );

Data written to stdout should be in $output variable. Remeber that http server will be waiting on this command until your script has ended, so be aware of waiting from keyboard input etc.

Answer 2

Just to show the output there's no real need for PHP here. Redirect the Perl output to a file that the web server can serve statically and access that with a browser.