What web pages do not do

I have been mostly working from EC1 not NW10, at the office, trying to merge gigabytes of data from one system to another. This task isn’t particularly suited to the web. Normally I’d attempt to use pure SQL for this type of thing but there are so many logical changes and exceptions to be made to this data that it needs some sort of script.

I have written BASH scripts, TCL scripts and, rarely, PERL scripts but it was nice to be able to turn to the PHP CLI interface in this case. And didn’t it run quick and do a good job.

It also means that developers I work with, who may not have seen a BASH script in their lives before, can use their PHP knowledge for all those housekeeping CRON jobs that always turn up sooner or later in any project.

CLI PHP is well covered in Advance PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle.