php 5.3.2 Unable to fork

Hello people! A time before I had issues with my php 5.2.3 that would not fork anything, neither in shell or via apache, and I figured out that commenting out the snmp.so extension from php.ini made it fork commands passed to php cli with an unprivileged user (www) fine, however apache still would not fork anything. Now I just compiled 5.3.2 and it doesn't fork at all, neither as root with -n option. For example I am running: root@saturno:/usr/src/apache/php-5.3.2# ./sapi/cli/php -n -r 'echo shell_exec("echo Test!");' Warning: shell_exec(): Unable to execute 'echo Test!' in Command line code on line 1 (neither system, exec, other options work) Any ideas on what is going on? (compiled using ../configure --prefix=/usr --with-apxs2 --disable-cgi --disable-short-tags --disable-ipv6 --without-sqlite3 --with-mysql --with-pdo-mysql --without-pdo-sqlite --enable-sockets --without-sqlite --with-gnu-ld) Thanks