Can you try the latest CVS? Or a development-binary from http://208.44.124.20/php-dev-win/

Does this problem still occur?

Tried it on 4.0.7, 4.1RC1a (with the win patch) and 4.2-dev
Failed on the lot of them with same behaviour (works in the command prompt, hangs in the browser).

Please try using this CVS snapshot:

  http://snaps.php.net/php4-latest.tar.gz
 
For Windows:
 
  http://snaps.php.net/win32/php4-win32-latest.zip

one year later :)

i've switched to a WinXP system. from the people who have posted successful runs of system() and exec() on w2k and xp i thought it would work.

however, it DOESN'T. i downloaded the latest dev version and tried that. and it still doesn't happen.

it works fine in the command prompt (with php.exe and php-cgi.exe). but in the browser (which uses php-cgi.exe) it gives the following:
Warning: system() [function.system]: Unable to fork [D:\Website\projects\testbed\test.bat] in D:\Website\projects\testbed\test.phpdev on line 6

so it doesn't hang the browser anymore but maybe that's because of xp's shoot to kill policy.

i tried fiddiling with the permissions to see if its the cause. but even with the most liberal permissions it gives the same result.

Yes, I have the same problem. For previous 24 hours I am trying to execute any program using exec, shell_exec, passthru... and Unable to fork or unable to execute. I have set up both IIS 5.1 and php.ini as unsecure as possible (temporary ;-) and no success. But I was successful on MS Windows ME, Apache 1.3.? and PHP 4.1.? for more than one year. So I am not sure, if it is not IIS configuration problem or problem with new directive in php.ini - cgi.something. I am running PHP 4.2.3 as a module. 

Stepan

Maybe this bug duplicates this one:
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=18958

Try this:

<?php

$cmd="c:\\winnt\\system32\\cmd.exe /c test.bat";
echo "Executing command: [$cmd]\n";
system($cmd,$value);
echo "Return value is: $value\n";

?>

finally got it to work! i couldn't make PHP use cmd.exe in the system32 directory since its not allowed to read from that directory. however, i copied cmd.exe into the script's directory and it worked. putting cmd.exe in php.exe's directory also worked. and i dont need to specify the command as "cmd.exe /c test.bat". using just "test.bat" works just fine.

so i guess the whole issue is having cmd.exe readable to php.exe and the simplest way to do that is placing cmd.exe in php.exe's directory. making system32 readable to PHP wouldn't very secure, since you would have to make it readable to all webserver processes.

Not PHP bug.

very good work marv, I have lost a lot of time for this problem.

I'm having the same problem with exec. 
Am using php 4.2.2 with apache2 on win XP.

I am trying to open another .php page using exec.

Batch file: test.bat
c:/php/php.exe c:/php/hello.php

hello.php:
echo hello;

on command line this works fine.

But when i tried :

$cmd="test.bat";
echo "Executing command: [$cmd]\n";
system($cmd,$value);
echo "Return value is: $value\n";

Browser hangs and when i did ctl+alt+del it shows lots of cmd and php.exe processes.

However if the test.bat file was :
echo hello

then it works fine.
Any ideas appreciated :)