Running External Apps

[vaiod]

I need to run an external application but am running into "Permission Denied" problems. The perl application just runs tar and gzip on some database files. I tried to do this through PHP but was unsuccessful. I wan't to build an app that allows me to run backups and restore backups of a database from remote locations.

Any Ideas?

[Karl]

Most backup scripts need to be run as root so that they can access all the files they need to backup, whereas a webserver usually runs as nobody or similar which doesn't have the same permissions and can't access certain files or caryr out certain tasks such as running some server programs - which is probably where you are running into trouble.