Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!weretis.net!feeder1.news.weretis.net!feeder.erje.net!eweka.nl!feeder.eweka.nl!postnews.google.com!news1.google.com!npeer03.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!spln!extra.newsguy.com!newsp.newsguy.com!news2
From: crankypuss <no@email.thanks>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.php
Subject: redirect stdout and stderr to PHP variables?
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:47:11 -0700
Organization: NewsGuy - Unlimited Usenet $19.95
Lines: 16
Message-ID: <jfpm810drs@news2.newsguy.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: pf183072ba85e4752cf8a8c82109b77e93317ac620a6b3f71.newsdawg.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111124 Thunderbird/8.0
Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.php:4611

I'm sure there's a way to do this, probably some simple syntax I've not 
run into and am too stupid to find in the manual or through google-fu or 
otherwise.

I'd like to issue an arbitrary shell command in a subroutine and have it 
return an array that contains one element representing stdout and 
another element representing stderr.

For example, using tar to deal with a bazillion files, error messages 
might not be seen when specifying verbose output; I'd like to collect 
them and display after stdout.

I've not found any syntax, yet, for redirecting to a PHP variable rather 
than some file.

tia.