Kae posted today about tackling this problem under Linux, but I've found that it's quite a different task under OS X.

It also uses some additional Perl modules (like Date::Calc and Date::Manip) to set up swatch. From there it's just a matter of adding a few lines to a configuration file to watch for the errors and sound the "bell". A few bash scripts will need to be added to correctly start the service too.

One big issue of the PHP error handling is that there's no built-in way to catch fatal errors with an user-defined error handler. So I thought a little bit about it and maybe you have better approaches or solutions...

With the goal of emailing the developers when such an error is thrown, he comes up with three different "storage methods" - using syslog, sapi, or a common logfile - and two different methods for watching them - file watching and syslogger. He works through these two options, trying to figure out which out be the simplest to implement.

He comes to the conclusion, though, that he might just be better off with one of the packages already out there to do something similar. Of the four he found, Swatch seemed to fit the best. He includes configuration and setup info to illustrate.