An Alternative To Perl: Shell Scripting With PHP
By Jayesh Jain

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.