What is the pclose() function in PHP?

pclose() closes a pipe opened by the popen() function. The file pointer initiated by the popen() function must be closed with pclose().

Syntax

pclose(resource $handle): int

Parameters

• handle: The file pointer returned by the call to the popen() function.

Return value

pclose() returns the termination status of the process that was run. $-1$ is returned in case of an error.

Code

The following code demonstrates the use of pclose(). Here, the termination status returned from the call to pclose() is stored in ＄exit_status and printed out to the standard output.