Introduction

As you have seen in previous chapters, PHP is useful for far more than applying it in a Web-scripting environment. However, when you use PHP for client-side scripting, at times it may be necessary to access lower-level operating system functionality. This chapter introduces you to a number of the facilities that PHP provides to access operating-system specific behavior. To help alleviate confusion throughout the chapter, I have divided it into two sections representing the two major categories of OS function calls in PHP: Unix-specific calls and platform-independent functions.