Just use "ls" like any other executable, like dmraid. It may not work because it probably is dynamically linked to a library in /lib, in which case you could bring over the library into your initrd. Of course your initrd will begin to get huge if you put everything in it, which is why there are smaller versions of these things, like busybox.

Why the reference to execve()? Well, more of a developer's thing than an endusers thing I think.

as you suspected, you were right - ls does not work because it uses dynamically linked libraries. so to get it working, it seems as though i have a couple choices:
1. include the libraries that ls needs in my initrd
2. recompile ls with --enable-static-link
3. use something like busybox

if i use busybox, does it contain all of its own libraries, or does it use dynamically linked libraries?

Busybox has the whole enchilada. Unlike nash it is a full shell and most of the usual commands like ls. Doesn't matter if you use it with Ubuntu, Slackware or PCLinux, because after loading the kernel and doing the initrd/switchroot it'll be gone. I guess this goes back to the idea of using slackware's initrd....

I copied 'busybox' over to my init-tree/bin/ folder, and now it seems i have full access to the commands I need.

a mount command shows the following:
/proc on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
/dev on /dev type tmpfs (rw)

a ls of /dev shows NO mapper folder. this is probably where the problem lies. i ran the mount and ls commands directly after the dmraid -ay command in my init script, so /dev does exist when dmraid runs, it is just not creating a mapper folder with the specified dmraid devices inside.

after a small amount of research, i found that a missing /dev/mapper folder could be caused by not loading the dm-mod.ko module. so i checked my init script, and alas, there was no dm-mod.ko module being loaded. so i copied the module over to my init-tree/lib/, added the insmod /lib/dm-mod.ko to my init script, and rebuilt the initrd.img. on next boot, i did not get a kernel panic, and the system actually booted fully off of the raid 0!! now all i need to do is create a backup of my init-tree and initrd.img, resync my 20g drive over to my raid to get the latest running image of my OS, and i should be good to go!

Congratulations, another RAID success story; now make sure you make a really good backup and document everything you did so that if you have to redo it (system reinstall/bare metal recovery etc.) it won't be reinventing the wheel.

I might go post a writeup on how to do this on the pclinuxos forums, i saw many raid setup threads on there while searching on how to do this and none were answered. and then i'll have two copies of how i did this, just in case i need to do a reinstall.
My system runs super fast now off my raid 0 raptor setup, i'm happy to have it back. Thanks for all your help.

You're welcome. I was thinking about writing up my simultaneous WinXP/Slackware dual boot RAID 1+0 setup, but there doesn't seem to be much demand on the WinXP side (not that many crazy dual booters who want to use RAID) and there's already great support in the docs on the Slackware side.