I hate feeding the trolls, though, on the other hand, "thanks for nothing" almost begs for PM's honour to be defended...

You may be right - it may work fine as the apache user. However, you provided no such evidence above. You ran your script as root - which has slightly more authority than the apache user. You missed the "su - apache" command somewhere after chsh and before ./listDisc.pl.

As I learned from a co-op job many many years ago, rule #2 of programming is "Are you testing what you think you're testing?" I don't recall what rule #1 was...