Ivo Jansch has a new blog post today looking at a method he's come up with to debug command-line PHP applications in Eclipse PDT with their needed parameters (not as a stand-alone script).

I write quite a lot of command line utilities in PHP and luckily PDT makes it easy to debug command line scripts. The thing with command line scripts is that often they require parameters passed on the command line, and PDT offers an easy way to pass them when you debug a script.

He quickly illustrates (with a few screenshots) how to get the debugger to prompt for the values of the PHP script you've selected. You can also use a similar technique in other Eclipse-based IDEs (like Zend Studio or Aptana).

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Troels Knak-Nielsen has a quick tip for those looking for a way to have their command-line PHP scripts be more interactive.

Just a quick tip, since I spent a good hour figuring this out recently. PHP has no native way of doing an interactive password prompt, when running as CLI. You can however use bash for the task.

His method (for both Windows and Unix systems) uses shell_exec command to run a VB Script/bash command that handles the password prompt for the PHP script. The result is then passed back into a variable and returned back to the calling application.