Problem with PHP4, chroot and sendmail

I have been trying to overcome the problem of not being able to send mail or running programs from PHP in a chrooted environment. My set up: Linux 2.2.14 Apache 1.3.14 php-4.0.3pl1 PHP4 was compiled with the following params: ./configure --disable-debug \ --enable-track-vars \ --with-apache=../apache_1.3.14 safe_mode = off sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i Apart from the prints and phpinfo(), the following snippet of PHP program produces NOTHING at all. $status = mail($recipient, $subject, $message, $headers); print "Mail Status = " . $status; print $status ? "OK<br>" : "Failed<br>"; // Always show "Failed" print "Doing chdir and system<br>"; chdir("/usr/local"); system("ls"); // Returns nothing print "Execing perl<br>"; exec('jhgjgjhgjhgjhg'); // Should generate an error but don't print exec('/usr/bin/perl -h') . "<br>"; // Returns nothing phpinfo(); // This is fine It is obvious that PHP is not executing any programs. Our chroot environment only have the following programs (they all work fine in chroot otherwise): perl gzip sendmail Do I need a shell to run sendmail and other programs within PHP? Any help as to why I couldn't run any program in PHP within a chroot environment is greatly appreciated. Regards, Kwong Li London, UK