PHP on command line
As of version 4.3.0, PHP supports a new SAPI type (Server Application Programming Interface) named CLI which means Command Line Interface. As the name implies, this SAPI type main focus is on developing shell (or desktop as well) applications with PHP. There are quite a few differences between the CLI SAPI and other SAPIs which are explained in this chapter. It’s worth mentioning that CLI and CGI are different SAPI’s although they do share many of the same behaviors.
The CLI SAPI was released for the first time with PHP 4.2.0, but was still experimental and had to be explicitly enabled with –enable-cli when running ./configure. Since PHP 4.3.0 the CLI SAPI is no longer experimental and the option –enable-cli is on by default. You may use –disable-cli to disable it.
