Shell Question

I have a drive mapped (with Samba) to a Unix box. I want to execute a Unix shell script through a Windows VB program with the "shell" command.

Shell("z:\program_name")

Of course, Windows itself tries to run the program and gets an error. Does anyone know if its possible to execute a Unix executable using the VB "shell" command or some other method??

to be absolutely clear, I *don't* want Windows itself to run the unix script (it can't of course) ... I only want the script to be launched in the unix environment via the VB program