Posted by Norman Peelman on 12/06/07 12:31

Kim wrote:
> I made a php script with a HTML form (POST) which takes many options
> and based on the options, it connects to a database file and create
> some files from the results. This works fine when using a browser.
>
> Now, I am being asked if it can run via CLI. My first reaction was
> "no", but that was before I even had looked into the matter.
> Running via CLI is preferred instead of having to install a webserver
> solution like WAMP. Also, the target machine which should run the PHP
> script is a standalone (no network of any kind).
>
> After reading some about PHP in CLI mode, and experiments have I come
> to this conclusion:
> * php.exe does not support GET, POST or HTML codes (it will displayed
> as raw text)
> * php-cgi.exe does support GET but still not POST or HTML codes.
> This means you can parse parameters to your php script, like: <php-cgi
> path> -n -f <php script> para1=value1 para2=value2 etc. Full access to
> $_GET.
>
> I still have not found a way to run this script via CLI.
>
> Do I need to re-write the whole thing specially for CLI mode ?
> Is there another way to parse parameters via CLI mode ?


....and as a follow-up, you want want to look at ncurses for display and
user input purposes. It'll give you the DOS like application view. I've
not used it but I believe if you area on Windows it can a bit of a bear
(or may not work at all) but on Linux it seems to work just fine (using
ubuntu and installing php5 and ncurses via the package manager it works
out of the box.

Norm

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