popen returns true whether script exists or not?

Hi, I'm trying to popen a cgi script that was designed to be open via a SSI include, but cannot because of passing variable restrictions. I'm popening a cgi script and it is returning a process pointer regardless of whether the string passed to it points to anything. Is this the expected response? <? $p = popen( "/web/guide/myfiles/bannerzzzzz.cgi","r" ); ?> this returns a process pointer even though bannerzzzzz.cgi doesn't exist I then need to read the results of the cgi script and dump them to the screen like so; <? while (!feof ($p)) { $buffer = fgets($p, 4096); echo $buffer; } pclose ($p); ?> but this is not functioning, does anyone have any ideas? Regards Tom Hodder