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Now in trunk: Improved interactive shell

PHP

A few years ago I used another blog to write about "More PHP power on the command line" almost 5 years later the PHP interactive shell got a major update which went in PHP's trunk. The commit message tells a lot about the improvements:

- Improved CLI Interactive readline shell (Johannes)
  . Added cli.pager ini setting to set a pager for output.
  . Added cli.prompt ini settingto configure the shell prompt.
  . Added shortcut #inisetting=value to change ini settings at run-time.
  . Don't terminate shell on fatal errors.

A pager can be a an shell command which will receive the command output on its
STDIN channel

php > #cli.pager=less
php > phpinfo();
(output will appear in the pager)
php > #cli.pager=grep -i readline
php > phpcredits();
Readline => Thies C. Arntzen
php > #cli.pager=
(output appears again direct on the terminal)

A prompt can contain a few escape sequences like

php > #cli.prompt=\e[032m\v \e[031m\b \e[34m\> \e[0m
5.3.99-dev php > //Colorful prompt with version number

A prompt can also contaian PHP code in backticks

php > #cli.prompt=`echo gethostname();` \b \>
guybrush php >

But I assume a screenshot is quite useful, so here it goes:

So what doyou need to use this feature? - PHP trunk compiled using --with-readline or --with-libedit.The PHP Documentation has information about the interactive mode, the new features will be added once trunk is closer to a release and it's clear in what release this will appear.

Posted by Johannes Schlüter in PHP Comments: (7) Trackbacks: (2)
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Comments
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julien said,

Friday, May 28. 2010 at 20:51 (Reply)

Well Done Johannes, interactive mode is definitly usefull, I think I almost use it every day!

my big congrats to you for this great contribution ;-)
hakre said,

Saturday, May 29. 2010 at 11:44 (Link) (Reply)

This is great news! I always wanted something like that because it encourages to test little things before using them in code. Thanks!
Olek said,

Monday, May 31. 2010 at 14:26 (Reply)

Cool, Johannes,

any plans to support
a) autoloading
b) auto-echoing the value of last expression? As in:

php > 2 + 2;
4
php > $name = 'Jane';
Jane
php > $msg = "Welcome, $name";
Welcome, Jane
Johannes said,

Monday, May 31. 2010 at 15:20 (Link) (Reply)

I thought about the auto-echoing but it is technically complicated to implement as many operations don't have a clear return value. And even for the ones there are it is not trivial to receive them.
Artem said,

Tuesday, June 1. 2010 at 14:16 (Link) (Reply)

What about auto loading?
Johannes said,

Tuesday, June 1. 2010 at 23:41 (Reply)

php > function __autoload($c) { var_dump($c); eval("class $c {}"); }
php > var_dump(new foo());
string(3) "foo"
object(foo)#1 (0) {
}

seems to work, or what am I missing?
Olek said,

Tuesday, June 8. 2010 at 08:20 (Reply)

See the bottom note at http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.interactive.php.

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