note 37691 added to function.shell-exec

I had major problems getting sell_exec() to work from PHP. It was working fine via the Telnet command line. Turns out (for me anyway) it was a pathing problem. I'm set up on a VPS FreeBSD server the does not (technically) have root access. PHP needs to reference the FULL PATH to the app it's calling. But it gets more tricky than that. There may be more than one full path on a server. For instance, on mine there is: >find ~/ -name mysqldump (VPS non-root search method) /usr/local/bin/mysqldump /usr/home/myusername/usr/local/bin/mysqldump /usr/home/myusername/usr/local/mysql-3.23.41/bin/mysqldump /usr/home/myusername/usr/local/mysql-3.23.43/bin/mysqldump Turns out (after 5 hours of hair pulling fun) that /usr/home/myusername/usr/local/mysql-3.23.43/bin/mysqldump was the winner. The same applies to using cURL and PHP via Cron. /usr/home/myusername/usr/local/curl-7.10.5/bin/curl works for me there. And tar wouldn't work until I dug up PHPTAR /usr/home/myusername/usr/local/bin/phptar. Never new that existed ... Good luck. ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.shell-exec.php Edit -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+37691 Delete -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+37691&report=yes Reject -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+37691&report=yes Search -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php