[snip] Do you need STDERR to go "out" to, err, wherever it goes, *AND* get it into your PHP script? Perhaps 'tee' (man tee) would let you do that. Or do you just need STDOUT in one variable, and STDERR in another, both in PHP? I think you could do something in shell to re-bind STDOUT to some other file/pipe, and then run your cool command... $tmpfile = tmpfile(); //I always get this one wrong. exec("rebind 2 $tmpfile; some cool command', $output, $error); $stderr = file_get_contents($tmpfile); It's probably not called 'rebind' but I know it's some shell command that does this. Possibly shell-specific, so you may even need to wrap the whole thing in a 'bash' call. Another option is to try to write a .sh shell script to get what you want for STDOUT to go where you want, and THEN just call that script (which has 'some cool command' at the end) from PHP, and let the weird-o shell stuff be done in a shell script, and not clutter up your PHP code with a complex shell script setup/tear-down. [/snip] I'd like to get STDERR into one variable in PHP and STDOUT into one. This so that when we execute a script and there is an exit code different from 0 I want to show a log of error/notices during the script. Actually I want to show the whole process if it fails so 2>&1 for exit code not equal to 0. I'll probably end up writing a patch for exec now :) /Peter www.dwsasia.com www.lauri.se www.carbon-free.org.uk -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php