PHP Powershell command

I'll take a stab although I have no PHP experience whatsoever.

I have a feeling that what's happening is your pipe character is being interpreted by the command shell instead of PowerShell. For example if you ran the following at the cmd.exe command prompt:

dir /s | more

The output of the first command gets piped to the input of the second just like you'd expect in PowerShell.

Escaping the string will only make the problem worse because you're transforming the string in such a way that PowerShell has no idea how to unescape it.

Try enclosing your original PowerShell expression in a quote like the following:

$output = shell_exec('powershell.exe -c "get-service | group-object"');

Or preferably, it looks like there's an exec() function that does not go through the command shell. This might work better.

$output = exec('powershell.exe -c get-service | group-object');

'powershell get-service | group-object'

will be interpreted as

1. run powershell and pass it get-service as an argument
2. then pipe the output of powershell to group_object (i.e. not the output of get-service)

What you want is for powershell to see get-service | group-object as it's argument, so you have to enclose that in quotes, like this.

 $output = shell_exec('powershell "get-service | group-object"');