shell() vs the socket

[Zac Elston]

I'm trying to write a process to listen and respond with the output of  commands told to it.

when using
read from socket thesocket until return
write shell(it) to socket thesocket

I get
:command not found

when I
put "/bin/ls" into it
write shell(it) to socket

 it works

on a whim i tried entering
man ls
once connected and I got
no manual entry for ls
this tells me it's a path problem since man was started but it didn't know where to find the manual for ls which is an environment variable, but then shouldn't  /bin/ls work since I'm telling it where to look?

what's the logic I am missing here?

thanks
-zac