The reason this has been relivant in the last two weeks is two fold, first off, my slow and sometimes painfull Pman.Core and Pman.Base). It seemed like an ideal time to write some generic code that can solve both issues.

He mentions the usual method of generating numerous emails and sending them to a remote SMTP server, but points out that there's a better way. You can take advantage of queuing and batch sending techniques and, the way he decided to do it for mtrack, using queue tables and a backend runner (a cron job) that uses proc_open to send out multiple emails at once. You can see the code for it here.

While doing a lint check on a code block, a parse error was occurring on a line that contained a comment in the original source file. [...] Presumably what was happening was, even though the var_dump() call showed that actual newlines were being interpreted correctly, the r was also being interpreted rather than taken literally. This caused the comma following it to generate the error I was receiving.

An alternative to the method he was using, shell_exec, is proc_open, a function that opens a resource to handle a command execution and allows for more than just the "point and shoot" execution that things like shell_exec, or system.