No sorry that didn't work

but no worries I got it working, it was those devilish quotes as expected.

so double quotes are required for the shell command and to get them attached on the variables when echo-ing is done by doing so:

\"$variable\"

so place the entire string into $cmd
then
echo the shell+$cmd like so:

echo "<pre>".shell_exec($cmd)."</pre>";

yahooooooooooooooooooooooo aaaaaaaaaaaaggghhhh

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