Executing Shell Scripts in PHP

Hi, I am wondering if anyone on this list has made attempts of executing shell scripts using PHP. Here is the code: <?php $command = "gcc -o hello.c"; exec($command); ?> So far, the actual program is something simple that prints out Hello, World. I have tried using // create a new cURL resource $ch = curl_init(); // set URL and other appropriate options curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://localhost/hello.c"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); All I got is the actual code content that is in one single long string. As for using the PHP snippet I have at the beginning of the email, all I get is a blank page, although it does not give me errors of the actual PHP program. Could anyone please tell me what problem I might be having here? Anything is appreciated. Alice ====================================================== Alice Wei MIS 2009 School of Library and Information Science Indiana University Bloomington ajwei@indiana.edu