June 14, 2005
PHP-CLI Semi-FAQ
I've been playing around with the PHP-CLI a bit recently and thought I'd post a couple solutions to issues that I have come across:
How can I prevent user input from being echoed back as it is being typed (e.g. for a password)?
Use the UNIX command stty to set terminal line settings. To this end I have created a simple function called ttyecho:
//*nix only... there is no way to do this in Windows unless you
//want to muck around w/ Windows Scripting
function ttyecho($on){
global $ttyecho;
if($on){
if(isset($ttyecho))
exec("stty $ttyecho");
}
else{
$ttyecho = exec("stty -g");
exec("stty -echo");
}
}
//Usage:
ttyecho(false); //turn off echoing
$password = trim(fgets(STDIN)); //read in a password
ttyecho(true); //turn echoing back onSuppose both STDOUT and STDERR are being redirected to a file like so:
#myscript > foo.txt 2>&1
. How can I guarantee that a certain string is echoed to the TTY and not redirected?Open up a stream to /dev/tty using fopen and then write to it just like you would to a file or to STDOUT. This is useful in cases where you are prompting the user for input and need to ensure he/she gets the message. (Won't work in Windows for obvious reasons)
I want to run a PHP script from the DOS prompt, but I am too lazy to type "php myscript.php". Couldn't I just type "myscript" and have it run like I do in Linux?
Sure thing... First off, the .php extension is not required, but you can take it one step further using a batch file. If your PHP file is named "myscript", create a batch file named "myscript.bat" in the same directory with the following two lines:
@echo off
php "%~dp0myscript" %*Assuming that the location of PHP executable and your scripts can be found via the PATH variable, you can call "myscript" from anywhere. "%~dp0" prepends the directory where the script is located and "%*" passes any command line parameters from the batch file to your script.
Questions? Comments? Errors? Let me have it.