PHP escapes shell commands for me?

PHP version 4.0.5 under: SunOS 5.8 Generic_108528-07 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise magic_quotes_gpc = On magic_quotes_runtime = Off It appears that PHP by default escapes arguments of any commands passed to exec() and friends (passthru(), popen()). As a result I am not able to pass an argument consisting of two tokens, separated by space, as one argument. Is this intended behavior? Is this inflicted by some option in php.ini? I have another server running FreeBSD with virtually identical php.ini file, and it doesn't exhibit such misbehavior. Many thanks for any ideas, -- Arcady Genkin i=1; while 1, hilb(i); i=i+1; end