exec() major probs

Hi I am having major probs trying to exec a command in PHP. All i want to do is fill a table from a tab delimited file from within PHP. I have set up a file called fillit which consists of: mysqlimport -u user -ppassword database list.txt This works from the command line perfectly. I made this executable & it runs perfectly with .fillit It will not run with exec, system or passthru. I have tried nearly all possible combinations with and without backticks, single, double and no quotes. I have rw access to the dir I am running from and have read the manual until I'm blue in the face! Has anyone out there used the xece command successfully?? Ps if I exec("ls -l"), it works fine ! Linux box Using PHP 4.0.??. latest version MySql, Apache Slackware TIA Terry