the whole idea i'm chasing here is getting the output to show up on the web page you are accessing.
for example, i got passthru() to work.
PHP Code:
<?
// prints /etc/passwd file
passthru("cat /etc/passwd");
print "<br><br>";
// this will print errors also
passthru("cat /etc/shadow 2>&1");
?>
now i want to get shell_exec() to work so i can actually get the output into a variable rather than just printing it out.