How can I remove slashes?

I'm just a beginner at PHP and I've been designing a simple page which allows our sales people to do commands like traceroute, ping, whois, etc from a webpage. Everything is working perfect right now, but I'm having problems with a feature I'm trying to add. If I use the whois command and want to look up a NIC handle, I can do this command from command line... >whois -h whois.networksolutions.com "handle MR2801" However, when using PHP I get the following output... /usr/bin/whois -h whois.networksolutions.com \'handle MR2801\' Is there anyway to easily remove the slashes? Here's the code I use. <? if ($whoistarget) { echo "<pre>\n"; system (EscapeShellCmd("/usr/bin/whois -h $whoistype " . "'$whoisoption " . "$whoistarget'")); echo "</pre><br><br>\n"; } ?> Thanks... Matt