exec() Error

Hi, I have got a task from my client asking me to build something that allows the variables in the PHP file passed to another PHP file or a file in a different computer language to perform some operations on another remote machine. According to my client, he calls this behind the scenes to avoid users screw up the front end, and I am hoping that I can produce one single script, and have it execute some script without the user pushing any button. Has anyone tried using exec() successfully in PHP to execute files from PHP or other programming languages? For example, C, Python, or Perl. I have tried this by putting in exec("http://www.mysite.com/calculate.php"); This is the error I got: Warning: exec() [function.exec]: Unable to fork [http://www.mysite.com/calculate.php] in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\read.php on line 31 I have checked my permissions, and I have set it to 755. Does anyone know how I might be able to correct this error? Thanks in advance. Alice ====================================================== Alice Wei MIS 2009 School of Library and Information Science Indiana University Bloomington ajwei@indiana.edu