Introduction

I know that you all want to get rid of Perl Scripts because of their complexity and the fact that Perl is not an easy language to learn. With the introduction of PHP version 4.2, PHP has started supporting a new SAPI (Server Application Programming Interface) called CLI (Command Line Interface). This facility was introduced to help developers create small shell application (scripts) with PHP, meaning that you can kiss Perl goodbye forever!

The CLI SAPI was released for the first time with PHP 4.2.0, but was still experimental back then and had to be explicitly enabled with --enable-cli when running ./configure. With PHP 4.3.0, the CLI SAPI will no longer be experimental and therefore will always be built and installed as the PHP (called php.exe on Windows) binary.

In this tutorial I will show you how to use PHP's CLI feature to interpret shell scripts. I will assume that you have a fair understanding of PHP and that PHP is installed and working properly on your computer. You can have PHP installed on Linux or Windows (the examples in this tutorial are demonstrated with PHP installed under Windows but they should work the same on a Linux machine).

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