[Pugged] php system() command

[ciapug@ciapug.org]

I'm trying to run an external command for a pdf generator - it's the Fytek "pdffile". We have an app that uses the win32 version. They recently released a Linux version and we're trying to port it over.

The Fytek people don't know much about linux... their app is written in Perl, and they used PerlApp to "compile" it into a binary.

I can run the "pdffile" binary from the command line and it generates PDF's just fine.

I'm attempting to do it from PHP using this:

<?
system("pdffile source.rpt output.pdf");
?>

I think the problem is that the binary is trying to use /root/tmp for it's temporary files. Apache is running as nobody, and nobody can't write to /root/tmp. (That doesn't sound grammatically correct...)

The Fytek guys thought I should try wrapping the call to the binary in a shell script where I set the $TMP system var to /tmp. I've tried that and it doesn't work for me.

I've tried variations of this script with putting the full path in and such... but here's the general idea:

#!/bin/bash
export TMP=/tmp
./pdffile $1 $2

Again, I can run this from the cmd line and it works.

Any ideas on this?

-dc