Like Perl, PHP can be used in standalone scripts as well as embedded in Web pages. Unfortunately, to do both you will need to build it twice: once for each type of use. (Version 4 of PHP supposedly allows a single build to provide both the standalone script engine and the Apache module.)

Building the PHP script interpreter is very simple:

    % cd ./php/php3/
    % rm -f config.status config.cache
    % make clean
    % ./configure --enable-discard-path other-options
    % make
    % make install

(Performing the make install step requires write access to the /usr/local/bin directory, so you may need to execute it as root.)

The --enable-discard-path switch on the ./configure invocation is necessary to use PHP scripts as CGI scripts under a Web server, such as in the cgi-bin directory. To just invoke PHP scripts directly from shell command lines, you can omit it. Of course, it does no harm to include it, so you might as well.

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