problem executing a shell script and psql command with exec()

[-_-PHP-_-]

Hi all,

I'm having problems with exec().

I'm trying to execute a shell script that executes psql command to dump results to a CSV file.

exec('/bin/sh /path/csv.sh');

csv.sh executes

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql -d dbname -u user -f /path/output.postgresql

(output.postgresql is the file that has some queries to output the results of a select statement to an output CSV file.)

while this works on my local machine (Intel Mac OS X 10.4, Apache 2.2, PHP 4.4.3) it fails to run on FreeBSD (Apache 1.3, PHP 4.4.2).

it seems like the user "nobody" running the Apache Web Server is failing to run the commands using the exec() function. I'm guessing that the reason why it's failing is that the psql is asking for a password, but I cannot place the .pgpass file since nobody has no home directory.

Also I haven't tried the NOPASSWD for nobody in sudoers file. I'm not sure if this is a good idea since apache can then run any sh and psql commands from exec().

Any ideas??