Hm have you tried to use this:
PHP supports one execution operator: backticks (``). Note that these are not single-quotes! PHP will attempt to execute the contents of the backticks as a shell command; the output will be returned (i.e., it won't simply be dumped to output; it can be assigned to a variable).
$output = ls -al;
echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
Also try exec() or popen()
On my last free provider, system() function was disabled, but backticks worked well, I don't know why, maybe there're different mechanism for running shell commands?
