4 ms·

zuck-mbpl:~ zuck$ php j play some red hot chili peppers PHP as a shell scripting language. Old habits die hard, huh?

Klathmon 10y ago
It's not a bad scripting language in that case. Quick startup, a good amount of CLI-specific APIs, available on many servers already, and no compiler or huge amount of tools needed. It's a bit verbose for little scripts that should be in something like bash, but it's a great alternative to something like python if you are more familiar with it.
- mfonda 10y ago
  In addition to this, if a lot of the libraries you're using are written in PHP, it makes a ton of sense that command line scripts using those libraries would also be written in PHP.
gfosco 10y ago
A decade ago, I used it like this for years at work. PHP is/was an awesome CLI script language. I always felt this was one of PHPs stronger use-cases, but lesser known and not pushed anywhere. Node has taken this spot, for me, but I'll never look down on PHP... It was very good to me.
tomschlick 10y ago
With projects like composer/symfony/laravel & the plethora of really good PHP packages out there, it is easy to write a good CLI with PHP these days.
- cutler 10y ago
  Simple text parsing in PHP7 is also faster than in Python, Ruby, Perl and NodeJS. I recently wrote some 1-liners to parse a 19Mb log file with a regex on my 2010 quad-core Mac. Python/Ruby: 2.2 secs. Perl: 1.4 secs. NodeJS: 0.9 secs. PHP7: 0.4 secs.
  - iso-8859-1 10y ago
    Can you show your code, at least?
    - cutler 10y ago
      Sure: Ruby IO.foreach('logs1.txt') {|x| puts x if /\b\w{15}\b/.match? x } Python3 import re with open('logs1.txt', 'rt') as fh: for line in fh: if re.search(r'\b\w{15}\b', line): print(line, end=' ') Perl open my $fh, '<', 'logs1.txt'; while (<$fh>) { chomp; say if $_ =~ /\b\w{15}\b/; } close $fh; NodeJS var fs = require('fs'), byline = require('byline'); var stream = byline(fs.createReadStream('logs1.txt', {encoding: 'utf8'})); stream.on('data', function(line) { if (line.match(/\b\w{15}\b/)) console.log(line); }); PHP $fh = fopen('logs1.txt', 'r'); while (($line = fgets($fh)) !== false) { if (preg_match('/\b\w{15}\b/', $line)) echo $line; } fclose($fh);

It's not a bad scripting language in that case. Quick startup, a good amount of CLI-specific APIs, available on many servers already, and no compiler or huge amount of tools needed. It's a bit verbose for little scripts that should be in something like bash, but it's a great alternative to something like python if you are more familiar with it.

mfonda 10y ago
In addition to this, if a lot of the libraries you're using are written in PHP, it makes a ton of sense that command line scripts using those libraries would also be written in PHP.

gfosco 10y ago

A decade ago, I used it like this for years at work. PHP is/was an awesome CLI script language. I always felt this was one of PHPs stronger use-cases, but lesser known and not pushed anywhere. Node has taken this spot, for me, but I'll never look down on PHP... It was very good to me.

tomschlick 10y ago

With projects like composer/symfony/laravel & the plethora of really good PHP packages out there, it is easy to write a good CLI with PHP these days.

cutler 10y ago
Simple text parsing in PHP7 is also faster than in Python, Ruby, Perl and NodeJS. I recently wrote some 1-liners to parse a 19Mb log file with a regex on my 2010 quad-core Mac. Python/Ruby: 2.2 secs. Perl: 1.4 secs. NodeJS: 0.9 secs. PHP7: 0.4 secs.
- iso-8859-1 10y ago
  Can you show your code, at least?
  - cutler 10y ago
    Sure: Ruby IO.foreach('logs1.txt') {|x| puts x if /\b\w{15}\b/.match? x } Python3 import re with open('logs1.txt', 'rt') as fh: for line in fh: if re.search(r'\b\w{15}\b', line): print(line, end=' ') Perl open my $fh, '<', 'logs1.txt'; while (<$fh>) { chomp; say if $_ =~ /\b\w{15}\b/; } close $fh; NodeJS var fs = require('fs'), byline = require('byline'); var stream = byline(fs.createReadStream('logs1.txt', {encoding: 'utf8'})); stream.on('data', function(line) { if (line.match(/\b\w{15}\b/)) console.log(line); }); PHP $fh = fopen('logs1.txt', 'r'); while (($line = fgets($fh)) !== false) { if (preg_match('/\b\w{15}\b/', $line)) echo $line; } fclose($fh);