On PHPHacks.com, there's a new tutorial that covers a a use for PHP that's not utilized nearly enough - working with it on the command line, shell scripting.

As most of us already know, PHP is the best language for developing dynamic web pages available today. Not many people are aware that it can be used as a shell scripting language as well. While PHP as a shell script isn't as robust as Bash or Perl it does have definite advantages, especially if you're like me and are more proficient in PHP than you are in Perl.

The requirements for using PHP as a shell language is that you must compile PHP as a CGI binary instead of as an Apache module. There are certain security issues related to this so please refer to the PHP Manual when doing so.

The author shows a simple example first, just outputting information. He also demonstrates how to grab the input parameters and how to read in from the command line interactively (both single lines and multiple).