One of the nice features of languages like Python, Ruby or LISP is the availability of an interactive shell. This goes in a Read-Eval-Print Loop and allows to quickly experiment with the language without having to write and execute scripts.
Unfortunately PHP has nothing like that out of the box, but one can find some external tools online. I found three and I'm not sure which are the relative advantages?
Did anyone try one of those shells and can give some advice about which one to use?
Unfortunately PHP has nothing like that out of the box
Yes, it does. php -a or php --interactive are what you're looking for. They're useless before PHP 5.3 (segfaulty promptless <?php-prefix-requiring crap), but they fixed it up pretty well... just don't do anything that will trigger a fatal error.
Oh, and if you need to include a file that tries to do use getopt, you can make it work by opening the prompt thusly:
php -a -- --custom -s -t -u --ff="goes here" --the=first --double-dash --is="Magic!"
php -a
via command line invokes the interactive shell
I've found Facebook's (Python based!) PHP shell to work great, I've never gotten PHP built in interactive shell to work without custom compiling.
Related
I'm writing a command-line application that will substitute a bunch of bash functions and manual work made by a team of developers. Currently, half of what we usually do is inside a ~/.functions file that is sourced in the ~/.bash_profile of each developer.
My command-line application is written in PHP, and for a while I would need to run some of those functions from inside my application. However, the following code would not work, the output says it cannot find the given function:
exec('bash my_legacy_functions.sh');
exec('my_custom_legacy_function param1 param2');
I may be wrong, but I could understand that every exec() call runs a command in a separate process, meaning the functions would not be available for subsequents exec() calls. Is this right, and if yes, would it be possible to override this behaviour without having to bundle everything into one call?
In the end it turns out the default shell was not bash, and on top of that source is not a common command in bash. I found by this other question's answer that the solution is something like:
function run($cmd) {
exec("bash -c 'source my_legacy_functions.sh; $cmd'");
}
I've been working on a CMS for a few years and I actually implemented a jquery-based console in the admin area, where you could do some handy things like enable/disable modules and so on.
I recently fiddled around with drupal and decided to install cygwin along with drush.
I tried googling around but figured this might be an unusual question: How does one go about creating a CLI for a php-based CMS? And exactly how does exactly drush worK? I mean, I know that it runs from the command line as a batch script in windows. But how does it interact with PHP and so on?
I do know some basic C# but this shouldn't be very hard once i figure out how this fits together. (php, sql, etc).
Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance :)
You can run a php cli from the terminal only when you have php compiled with cli support. Additional you need to specify an interpreter and pass the path to the script as argument. But you can also use a shebang #!/path/to/php. A better practise would be to use the env variable and not hardcode the path to php: #!/usr/bin/env php. Read here about it: http://tech.vg.no/2012/02/21/dont-hardcode-php-executable-path-in-shebang/.
Basically you can write a simple CLI shell with a infinite loop plus a 'exec()' or 'shell_exec()' PHP functions. you should get the user commands and send it to shell_exec() function for execute in a system shell and return the output of that to the user.
i.e:
while(TRUE){
if($input != 'exit')
$output=shell_exec($input);
else
break;
echo $output;
}
you can add other options and customize this simple loop.
you can call external programs with 'exec()' function.
I am trying to print generated forms / receipts through PHP (the printers will be installed on the server, I am not attempting to print to a user's local printer). I have decided to try the following methodology:
IN PHP:
Generate a PDF file and save it on the server.
Call a perl script to print said PDF file.
IN perl:
Use system() to "open" Reader and print the given PDF silently.
What works:
I can generate PDFs in PHP.
I can call a perl script.
If the script has errors, they report to the browser window. ie: If I purposely change file paths it fails, and reports the appropriate reason.
functions such as printf seem to work fine as the output displays in the browser.
The exact same perl script (with the "non-functioning" line mentioned below) works properly when executed from the command line or the IDE.
What doesn't work:
In perl: system('"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Adobe\\Reader 10.0\\Reader\\AcroRd32.exe" /N /T "C:\\test.pdf" 0-XEROX');
What happens:
NOTHING! I get no errors. It just flat out refuses to open Adobe Reader. All code below this line seems to run fine. It's like the function is being ignored. I am at a loss as to why, but I did try a few things.
What I've tried:
Changed permissions of the AcroRd32.exe to Everyone - Full Control.
Output the $? after the system() call. It is 1, but I don't know what 1 means in this case.
Verified that there are no disable_functions listed in php (though I think this is unrelated as shell_exec seems to be working, since some of the perl code is ran).
Various other configurations that at least got me to the point where I can confirm that PHP is in fact calling the perl script, it just isn't running the system() call.
Other info:
Apache 2.2.1.7
PHP 5.35
Perl 5.12.3 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
WampServer 2.1
I'm at a loss here, and while it seems like this is an Apache / permissions problem, I cannot be sure. My experience with Apache is limited, and most of what I find online is linux commands that don't work in my environment.
Try this:
my #args = ('C:/Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Reader 10.0/Reader/AcroRd32.exe');
if (system(#args) != 0) {
# Can't run acroread. Oh Noes!!!
die "Unable to launch acrobat reader!\n";
}
The thing about system() is that it does two different things
depending on the number and type(s) of argument it gets. If the
argument is an array or if there are multiple arguments, Perl assumes
the first is the program to run with the rest as its arguments and it
launches the program itself.
If, however it's just one string, Perl handles it differently. It
runs your command-line interpreter (typically CMD.EXE on Windows) on
the string and lets it do what it wants with it. This becomes
problematic pretty quickly.
Firstly, both Perl and the shell do various kinds of interpolation on
the string (e.g. replace '//' with '/', tokenize by space, etc.) and
it gets very easy to lose track of what does what. I'm not at all
surprised that your command doesn't work--there are just so many
things that can go wrong.
Secondly, it's hard to know for sure what shell actually gets run on
Windows or what changes Perl makes to it first. On Unix, it usually doesn't matter--every shell does more or
less the same with simple commands. But on Windows, you could be
running raw CMD.EXE, GNU Bash or some intermediate program that
provides Unix-shell-like behaviour. And since there are several
different ports of Perl to Windows, it could well change if you
switch.
But if you use the array form, it all stays in Perl and nothing else
happens under the hood.
By the way, the documentation for system() and $? can be found here and here. It's well worth reading.
If I want to try out something new in Ruby or Javascript, I love getting immediate feedback from irb or the JS console in Firebug.
Is there anything like that for PHP?
Update
As #bernie pointed out, such tools are called REPLs - "Read-eval-print loop"
Run php -a in the command-line. But this does not work on Windows.
For Windows, you may want to try phpa-norl.
Yes, there is a way: php -a,
-a means interactive shell
php -a is the closest thing I know of but it's not quite like irb. irb will execute each line at a time. php -a will wait until you press ctrl-D (for end of line) and will then execute all lines.
How about phpsh? It's not fully compatible with PHP, but it represents a serious effort.
http://www.phpsh.org
Boris
I'm not working with PHP currently, but I just spotted this online and remembered I had once asked this question. Boris looks very nice.
https://github.com/d11wtq/boris
If you have a Mac, I find the PHP Code Tester program a much better way to accomplish the same thing: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/37328/php-code-tester
Specifically, I need to automate the encoding of audio files into mp3 with LAME. You don't need to know LAME to answer this, I could be talking about svn or some other program..
I know how to use LAME on the command line to do this, for one file at a time.
I would like to do this via a php script however, so I can convert a bunch at once (for instance, all the files in a directory)
So what I am confused about, is how I should invoke the program, LAME. I could definitely use
shell_exec()
http://php.net/manual/en/function.shell-exec.php
But is that a "screwy" way to do it, since I am going through the shell?
Should I be using lame_enc.dll somehow instead, instead of lame.exe?
It seems like I could somehow do it with exec() also http://php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
But in that case, how would I supply the arguments?
Or is there a better way to do it, maybe a .bat file? I am running windows
Should I be using lame_enc.dll instead of lame.exe somehow?
You can use exec() and specify arguments just like you would on the command line. Other options are outlined on the Program Execution manual page for PHP.
It's possible to do it with PHP. Not a typical use case scenario but it can be done. Since you are on Windows, a bat file would be better suited since then you don't need the PHP parser to run the script.
Put the same commands you would run in the console to convert your audio files with LAME in a *.bat. Then run the bat as if it was a regular executable file.