calling perl from within php

Apologies if this is documented here, especially since it seems to be something commonly done, but I couldn't locate it. My problem: We are running PHP 4 on a Solaris 2.7 box with Apache 1.3.11 with mod_perl 1.24. We need to communicate with 3rd-party Perl APIs from within PHP to handle processing of a form. The API functions each expect an associated array and will return a result value to the calling party. I would assume that we would use exec( 'perl cgi-bin/myscript.pl', $assoc_array, $return_value) to do this, placing the perl script I write to handle the values in the server's cgi-bin directory. If this seems right, I would see the array in the perl script by parsing out the array, getting the values and sending them to the API functions. When I get the returned value from the called perl function in the API, I return it by assigning it to the third parameter in the perl script. I've worked with perl before, but it's been a while and I am trying to get back in the perl mind frame and I've never combined it with PHP so I could be off here. Any help would be greatly appreciated. TIA ---------------------- Kevin McCarthy Body & Soul http://www.bodynsoul.com