When you're working with error reporting, every little bit helps. If you're a Perl user coming into a PHP world, then this new post from Matthew Weir O'Phinney might provide a valuable tip.
Unfortunately, there's not as simple a way to do this in PHP as in perl.
On perlmonks today, a user was needing to maintain a PHP app, and wanted to know what the PHP equivalent of "perl -wc script.pl" was -- specifically, they wanted to know how to run a PHP script from the commandline and have it display any warnings (ala perl's strict and warnings pragmas).
He suggets two ways to do it - one involving the display_errors setting and a change to the error_reporting level, and the other an automatically prepended file that does the same (just simpler to use). He also mentions a side note, a question the user had about running a PHP script on the command line.