shells

Alan Pinstein has put together an interactive PHP shell that gives you some interesting advantages over PHP's default shell feature.

php is an interactive php shell that solves a number of painful problems with normal php shells: error handling, readline support, autocomplete, history, require support an autoload support.

You can grab the latest version from his github repository.

Most shells maintain a history of the commands that you've typed and that history can be used to save time and typing.

Most of us have probably used the up/down arrow keys already to move through the list of commands that we've already entered, but there are other ways to access the data in the history list.

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On his blog recently teknoid has posted a deeper look at using shells for the CakePHP framework that allow you to quickly make your application usable from the command line.

I like to open a lot of tabs in my terminal (konsole) window: a few standard shells, a couple of su shells, and some ssh connections to other systems that I access regularly.

KDE can remember some of these settings via its session capability, but it doesn't always remember everything I want, and sometimes it remembers things I wish it would forget.

So, to get my standard tabs, I use DCOP to start what I want when I want it.

When writing bash scripts you sometimes need to run commands in the background. This is easily accomplished by appending the command line to be run in the background with an ampersand "&".

But what do you do if you need to run multiple commands in the background? You could put them all into a separate script file and then execute that script followed by an ampersand, or you can keep the commands in your main script and run them as a sub-shell.

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