Hello. the purpose of my efforts right now are to get a larger script of mine (which the admin told me he'd put into cron for me) to properly back-up my MySQL database. To test out the sql back-up part (before getting the whole script into cron, and having it not work) I wanted to test it. So here's what I did:

PHP file to do my testing (on the live server)

<?php

$test = shell_exec('echo $SHELL');
echo "<pre>$test</pre>";

$output = shell_exec('sh ./sqlBack.sh');
echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
?>

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

# MYSQL BACKUP:
sql_bDir="./sql_backups/" #LOCATION FOR SQL BACKUPS TO LAND
sql_bName=SqlBackup_$(date "+%A")

echo "The Shopping Cart's database backup will be in $sql_bDir and will be named $sql_bName" #NOTICE OF DATABASE BACKUP
mysqldump -uNAME -pPASS --opt DBASENAME > $sql_bDir$sql_bName.tgz