Posted by d on 02/03/06 14:42

"jonathan.beckett" <jonathan.beckett@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1138970152.834117.49630@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
> Hi all,
>
> We have PHP 4 installed on Windows 2003 with Apache 2, and the
> shell_exec has mysteriously stopped working - it hangs the page rather
> then returning anything.
>
> To check it out, I tried shell_exec("dir") which works fine on the
> development machine, but not on the live server.
>
> I'm guessing the network guys have done something to the security of
> the live server that would cause this - but it's very strange; why
> would Apache (running under the default system account) not allow PHP
> to run shell_exec statements?
>
> I have checked PHP and it's not in safe mode.
>
> I'm a bit stuck - any ideas would be appreciated...

Have you checked the permissions of the cmd.exe file in windows\system32?
It has to be executable by the user the web server is running as... Usually
that will return an error, though, so it might not be the cause of your
problem... :)

dave

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