Shell scripting and PHP

Hi Everyone,

I'm pretty new to PHP and I'm not sure how to do something that I need to implement. I'm designing a simple web site as an interface to an already existing backend. The idea is that people write their own AI to compete against other people in simulated games of 8 ball pool. Originally competitors compile the code on their machine and make a call to the server to execute a game through their terminal. My job is to allow this to be done through a web interface. Originally I tried setting it up so that people would upload their code to the server and then it would recompile and execute..but apparently this isn't good because we don't know how many files the users will have and a few other reasons. so my question is: is it possible to to get php to somehow execute a shell script on the client's machine? I know php is run on the server-side of things, is there any way that this can be done? So basically it will be the same as originally except the parameters will be entered into the website instead of a terminal...

Thanks in advance for any help.

Php can execute shell commands, but you can't trigger a shell execution in the client from the server.

I think you need another solution for this :)