PHP Shell Access/Safe Mode?

[vonbrocklin]

According to my phpinfo() file, safe_mode is set to OFF on unix2. From what I have read, this means I should be able to use the PHP shell_exec command even if I do not have true shell access on the machine. (I don't have this set up.) I am trying to connect to HTML Tidy to parse form input to XHTML, but here is more simple example of what I mean:

<?php
$shell = shell_exec("date"); 
echo $shell;
?>

Does anybody know why this does not work?

[vonbrocklin]

Bah. Never mind. I had another small error that was messing things up. The code above works perfectly fine. Now I will have to see if I can tie into HTML Tidy.

p.s. And in case anybody tries the above code, it is BAD BAD way to get the date!!! I was just using for example, use the PHP date function instead.