Lynx won't run from php

[tatacalu]

Hello!!!

I have a very nasty problem:
I cannot run lynx from PHP anymore.
Until a few days ago everything was OK... but when I tried today to run

lynx -dump http://www.~~~whatever~~~.com/file.php

with exec() nothing happened.

That file was on my server and if it was executed inserted a row in a Database table [it is just a test file so that I can see that lynx ran].

I ran

exec('whoami');

and I saw that the user was "apache" [I did that to see if I can execute system calls through exec() ... obviously I can].

So ... the question is: what can I do about this problem ? I have absolutely no ideea what caused that and how to solve it.

Thanks !!!

[tatacalu]

I dug a little bit into apache's error logs and realised that every time I tried to run:

exec ( 'lynx -dump http://www.google.com' );
In my apache httpd error log appeared a new line:

/root/: No such directory
I tried to run from the linux command shell:

sudo -u apache lynx -dump http://www.google.com
and the same error message appeared in the command shell.
Then I changed the attributes of my /root/ directory to 777... surprise, everything went OK - in PHP the exec() went fine, in the command prompt the sudo -u apache lynx .... went fine.

Thinking a little bit about security issues, I changed the attributes of /root/ as they were (to 750 = read/write/exec by owner, read/exec by group).

Given this situation, what options do I have to fix this problem ?? First of all, I don't understand why would lynx require full access to /root/ if it would be running as apache ...

Does anybody have any ideas on this?

Thanks!