Right, it was just a random example that popped into my head. You would probably also want to think twice about using -R (at least with GNU grep), about hard-co

Right, it was just a random example that popped into my head. You would probably also want to think twice about using -R (at least with GNU grep), about hard-coding the search directory, &c. All of PHP's process-execution methods (except one, which is unusable on many systems) go through the shell, so by virtue of that it also searches the PATH.