Having trouble with exec function calling CGI program

Hello I'm a newbie and having trouble with the EXEC function call from a PHP script. EXEC seems to work ok for executing shell commands like 'ls -al' etc. but when I execute the following PHP web page code... ---------------------------------- $basedir = '/mnt/web/xxx/myplace'; $cdir = $basedir . '/cgibin'; $cmd = "cd $cdir;pwd;perl -w myscript.cgi"; echo "cmd: $cmd<br>"; $result = exec($cmd,$arr,$status); echo "status: $status [$result]<br>"; ---------------------------------- Note: myplace and myscript.cgi are made up names. The cgi program has been chmod'ed to 755 so it can run from a webpage and the cgi program runs fine when not called from the PHP script. I get a status code of 155. Can someone please explain what this error code means! Thanks in advance Tony Frasketi