From the commit that introduced this bug: The point of the question here is if anybody remembers why we decided not to parse command line args for the cgi

From the commit that introduced this bug: The point of the question here is if anybody remembers why we decided not to parse command line args for the cgi version? I could easily see it being useful to be able to write a cgi script like: #!/usr/local/bin/php-cgi -d include_path=/path <?php ... ?> and have it work both from the command line and from a web context. As far as I can tell this wouldn't conflict with anything, but somebody at some point must have had a reason for disallowing this. Perfectly illustrating the utility of well-chosen comments in code.