> popen() requires a shell. You are most likely running it in a chroot and > don't have /bin/sh.
Bingo! I copied all the necessary libs to corresponding usr/lib dirs and got the chrooted programs to run from a chroot command, but they would still not work from the cgi program. You pointing out that popen requires sh got me thinking. Sh was already in /var/www/bin but it had 000 for perms. I make it 111 and it works now! Thanks!