Nio’s Weblog

Command-line PHP? Yes, you can!

The benefits of CLI PHP

For many years now, I've been applying a dubious definition of what it means to be an engineer. By my reckoning, an engineer is someone who uses a tool for something other than its originally intended purpose. While that isn't always a good idea, when you get down to it all, invention and, indeed, most innovation come from using something in a way you hadn't necessarily thought to use it before.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the idea hit me to use my old friend PHP, which has always been so reliable on Web pages, as a command-line tool. I'm hardly the first person to do this, but the idea was certainly new to me.

Of course, just the fact that you can use PHP on the command line isn't necessarily the best reason for doing so. However, you might quickly find several pleasant surprises when you first begin to experiment with PHP in this way. To begin with, debugging existing scripts becomes far, far simpler than ever. Programs that consist primarily of output with very little logic are incredibly simple in PHP. Beyond that, you can use all your knowledge of PHP to make it accomplish tasks you would never have thought of it for before. In fact, there's really nothing stopping you from using PHP as your Swiss Army knife for almost any given programming project.

Intrigued? Well, let's get started and see what you can accomplish by using PHP on the command line.

记得很早之前，我也经常写一些 PHP 脚本，放在 Linux 服务器上运行，比如自动打包、加密之类的，使用起来非常方便，当然前提是你必须熟悉 PHP