(newbieish) import is acting funny (at least to me)

[Chris]

Howdy,

I've written a PHP script to attempt to create a module. Basically, it
creates a dir, cd's into it, calls import, then removes the dir. The
actual command looks like this:

cvs -d /usr/home/chris/cvsroot import -m '' modulename arg1
arg2

This is the actual command string that's executed - I have PHP dump it to
the screen right before it executes it. I also dump the response, which
is

No conflicts created by this import 

That should be good news, except that the module isn't created! I can't
check it out, and there's nothing in $CVSROOT - it's simply not there.
When I cut-n-paste the command to the console and enter it, the module
does in fact get created.

The only thing I can think of is that on the console I'm logged in as
chris, but my Web server is a different user of course, so it's a user
issue. However, I have other simple scripts to create a project, that
basically work the same way, and they've succeeded.

Any ideas?
Thanks a lot,
Chris