Answer by the for Running a Python script from PHP

If you want to know the return status of the command and get the entire stdout output you can actually use exec:

$command = 'ls';exec($command, $out, $status);

$out is an array of all lines. $status is the return status. Very useful for debugging.

If you also want to see the stderr output you can either play with proc_open or simply add 2>&1 to your $command. The latter is often sufficient to get things working and way faster to "implement".