I just learned something new today in PHP.  It’s the Backtick Operator.  What it does is executes a shell command and captures its output.  You can then store that in a variable for use.  I am pretty sure this is a UNIX command only.  Not sure if this will work in windows or not.  Here is how you use it.

< ?php
$a = `ls -l`;
echo $a;
?>