Amir Saied recently posted a handy little tool for the PEAR users out there - a bash script that handles tab completion for you.

Lately I've been playing alot with the PEAR CLI. The one annoying thing I noticed the most was its lack of tab completion that I'm used to from the shell. It turns out that this feature is very easy to add, in the bash at least.

It will finish off the PEAR commands for you and expand out the PEAR package names and discovered channels when it finds a match. You can download the package here.

Sometimes, you just can't get to a web browser to look up something from the PHP manual (or might not want to). Another option is the command line and in this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog, Troels Knak-Nielsen shows you a method for getting the entire manual entry right at your prompt neatly formatted.

One thing, I missed with either of the two [other solutions mentioned], was the ability to see the entire manual entry. It's quite often, that the manual actually holds useful information (Who'd known that!), so I find myself using www.php.net a lot. Or I did, until I decided to do something about it. Now, shell-scripting isn't what I spent most of my time on, so it's not with out a bit of pride, that I present to you phpm two-oh.

Most of the rest of the post is his bash script ready top cut and paste as well as some simple instructions on getting it working. (An emacs bonus is also included - a method for binding the script to a key to act on the current word.)

You know you're moving up in the world when Microsoft feels that it's necessary to make cartoon disparaging your products, in favor of their own wares. Pierre, one of the PHP developers, has found this gem on the French segment of the Microsoft site. I guess it means that PHP is making enough in-roads into the Enterprise market, that big fish like MS feel it necessary to spread some FUD as a stop-gap measure.

Check out this version for an english translation...