Joshua Thijssen has a new post to his blog looking at taking a common unix tool - traceroute - and seeing if he could translate it into PHP where it could be called directly without the need for something like exec.

Today i was reading upon this wonderful article about writing a trace-route program in Python in 40 lines. Even though trace-route is one of the many tools i use on day to day basis, i never really got into writing a version myself (something I like to do just to gain knowledge how things works). So when I was reading this post, i thought, Python is nice, but is it possible to do it in PHP as well? The answer to that: yes and no..

His post introduces you to "traceroute" (including a bit on how it works) in case you're either not a unix user or haven't gone much past some of the basics of the operating system type. One issues he butted up against was problems with the socket extension in PHP and inconsistencies with the underlying connection types. Another is the limitation of the tool only working as the root superuser. He includes the actual code and some sample output if you'd like to try it for yourself.