Are you talking about seeing what processes are running on the server? What OS? $top will list those (linux/Unix). It depends on what privelges are given to the web server user (and what OS) If it’s on linux/unix I doubt that the apache user has those privelges, at leats they shouldn’t. You can run commands using backticks (Linux/Unix). Like:
echo `top | grep "httpd"`;
I don’t use windows for servers so I don’t know if there is a difference (php syntax) from running dos commands via php.
also using exec(); does the same thing as backticks.