php cli in shell script

generaldarkness

Having trouble with running php in a shell script.

The command im trying to use is

 echo '<?php echo "test"; ?>' | php -q

This simply returns nothing from the command line, ive tried path to php aswell and no joy.

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q

<?php echo "test"; ?>'

Will work, so it looks like the cli is working but i cant execute it from within a shell script.

php -v shows

PHP 5.2.5 (cli) (built: Nov 22 2007 02:14:24)
Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies
    with the ionCube PHP Loader v3.1.32, Copyright (c) 2002-2007, by ionCube Ltd., and
    with Zend Extension Manager v1.2.0, Copyright (c) 2003-2007, by Zend Technologies
    with Zend Optimizer v3.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007, by Zend Technologies

was built with whm really cant work out how to get this working, anyone got any ideas?

Thx in advance

bradgrafelman

Your problem is the '<' and '>' characters have special meanings (namely, read input from a file and direct output to a file, respectively). Thus, you need to escape these characters so that the shell knows you don't mean to use their special functions.

In MS-DOS on Windows, the escape character is a '^'. On Unix, I would guess that it's '\', but I can't be sure since I don't have a Unix system to test this with. Give that a shot, though, and see if it fixes it.

generaldarkness

bradgrafelman wrote:
Your problem is the '<' and '>' characters have special meanings (namely, read input from a file and direct output to a file, respectively). Thus, you need to escape these characters so that the shell knows you don't mean to use their special functions.

In MS-DOS on Windows, the escape character is a '^'. On Unix, I would guess that it's '\', but I can't be sure since I don't have a Unix system to test this with. Give that a shot, though, and see if it fixes it.

Hey bradgrafelman, thx for the quick reply unfortunatly it didint work i tried \ and / with no joy still just returning nothing from command line and shell script itself.

#!/bin/sh

echo '\<?php echo "test"; ?\>' | php  -q

fireing blanks

bradgrafelman

Ah, well, in that case you'll have to wait for someone knowledgeable in using Unix to come along, as I've gotten a bit rusty... :/