Wayne May

PHP use backticks as execution operators, which will return the output of to be assigned to a variable. Any code between backticks will be executed as a shell command – the backtick operator is identical to shell_exec()

One example where I found this useful was to get the fully qualified domain name of a server. I could do something like:

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$fqdn = shell_exec('hostname --fqdn');

or using backticks, I can so something like:

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$fqdn = `hostname --fqdn`;

Notice that I am using backticks (`) and not single quotes (‘)