shell_exec() returning null on “ls”

Question

So I have this code and I\'m only trying to make a list of the saves in another directory where the php scrip is in xampp folder and the saves are to this path /root/f

Answer 1

Add 2>&1 to the end of your shell command to have STDERR returned as well as STDOUT.

$output = shell_exec("ls /root/files/saves 2>&1");

Also, if the user running PHP doesn't have sufficient permissions to view the output in /root/, the above code will return a Permission denied error message.

Source: http://php.net/manual/en/function.shell-exec.php#28994