In a new post to his blog, Paul Jones anout a small issue when working with the PHP 5.2.5 command line functionality - a segfault if you extend the Exception class.

When executing code at the command line using php -r and PHP 5.2.5, be sure not to extend the Exception class. It will cause a segmentation fault.

He includes examples of the issue that would cause the problem and the bug he's filed in an effort to get it fixed.

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.

Joshua Eichorn has blogged about three new projects he's added to the PEAR2 repository:

• COnsole_CommandLine - a port of the PEAR1 console package
• Template_Dwoo - a Smarty-compatible template engine
• template_engine - a simple templating engine (and the example package for namespace usage)

Not really what I expected to be the first round of new code, but its nice to be setting up access for people. Oh and remember PEAR2 is targeted at php 5.3 but not everything is namespaced yet since not everyone wants to run snapshots of php for development.

You can find more of the packages on the PEAR2 svn repository.

On the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta has posted an introduction to working with command-line PHP scripts and cron jobs for site automation.

Scheduled tasks are a fairly common feature in modern web applications. From cleaning out caches every 24 hours to checking subscription periods and even generating reports, more web applications live by the clock than ever before. But how do we schedule the execution of a PHP script on the server side?

He shows the two key things to getting it working - an example of a command-line call to a PHP script (executed through his /usr/bin/php) and an example of a line from a crontab showing how to execute the script at midnight every day.

Akash Mehta shares a helpful hint in this new post to the Developer Tutorials Blog today - testing out PHP code via the command line PHP binary.

Thankfully, PHP provides the interactive shell, allowing you to test out PHP interactively with immediate feedback. Here's how to take advantage of this mature feature of PHP.

With the help of the "-a" flag on the command line, the PHP binary will hand you an environment where you can code PHP and instantly see the results. He does mention a few quirks that make it different than working with PHP through a web server, namely moving in and out of code blocks and remembering to finish out with a semi-colon when the line is done.

New on the Debuggable blog today there's this post from Tim Koschutzki about a new feature he's contributed back to the CakePHP project. It allows you to run tests on the command line without having to worry about loading up a web interface to check your code.

It allows you to run all of the following: all core testcases at once, all core test groups, each core test case individually, all application-specific testcases at once, all application-specific test groups and each core test case individually. It also supports plugins, which means you can run plugin cases and groups.

He includes some samples of how it works - a few command line calls and what the output looks like.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted some details about an update that's been made to the test runner for the PHPUnit (3.3) unit testing suite - an allowance for directories instead of just files on the command line.

Given a directory, the test runner will recursively scan the directory for *Test.php files, build a test suite out of the *Test classes, and run it.

PHPUnit is framework that makes writing tests for your code easy and also includes functionality to run the tests and analyze their results.

According to the Zend Developer Zone, the Zend Framework is going to the even more powerful in the future with the inclusion of command line functionality.

So, without further adieu, it is my pleasure to announce that Zend Framework 1.5 will include a robust, powerful, and- yes- 15-minute-demo-enabled command line interface for code generation!

They've set up a default structure (that's "recommended") but doesn't have to be strictly adhered to. They know how most developers have structured their applications and made it accordingly. There's three proposals in the group - the Zend_Console, Zend_Build component and the Zend_Build for Core.

Sebastian Bergmann demonstrates another feature of the popular PHPUnit unit testing software in new post to his blog, specifically the TestNG-style of test.

Starting with version 3.2, PHPUnit has support for TestNG-style @grouping of tests.

He includes an example of the style, a test case that, through the command line testing tool, can be called in portions depending on the need.

On Developer.com today, Jason Gilmore has written up a tutorial that introduces one of the handy features that came with upgrading to PHP5 - SQLite support:

One such solution is SQLite, a fully-featured relational database that, at just 250KB, is by itself able to easily fit on a floppy disk yet is capable of managing terabyte-sized databases. [...] In this tutorial, I'll introduce SQLite, showing you how this database can offer you maximum return with minimal investment.

He introduces the library by showing how it can be used from the command line (along with an example database) and how to turn on support for it in PHP and make queries in the normal SQL syntax.