escapeshellarg
(PHP 4 >= 4.0.3, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
Escape a string to be used as a shell argument
Description
escapeshellarg() adds single quotes around a string and quotes/escapes any existing single quotes allowing you to pass a string directly to a shell function and having it be treated as a single safe argument. This function should be used to escape individual arguments to shell functions coming from user input. The shell functions include exec(), system() and the backtick operator.
On Windows, escapeshellarg() instead replaces percent signs, exclamation marks (delayed variable substitution) and double quotes with spaces and adds double quotes around the string. Furthermore, each streak of consecutive backslashes (\) is escaped by one additional backslash.
The behavior of this function with multibyte strings depends on the current LC_CTYPE locale setting. Unrecognized characters will be discarded. See setlocale().
Parameters
argThe argument that will be escaped.
Return Values
The escaped string.
Examples
escapeshellarg() example
<?php
system('ls '.escapeshellarg($dir));
?>