Are you aware of the permissions restrictions on web servers? They usually come in a very low permissions level, and unless you are running suexec ( or similar ), you probably don't have the permissions to run the script. You may have to ssh in to run your script as a priviledged user.

I'm guessing that you get the symptoms with the options because the script fails differently, and gives you the appearnace that it ran. What does your server logs say?