PHP#

What can I say? It’s Personal Home Page Tools. That’s what it is good for. Personal home pages where you inject dynamic stuff into static HTML. But not for much more. Unfortunately I am forced to “work” with this language and here I collect some Nice Features (tm) that I found over time.

System Exit#

Scripts should exit with 0 on success and 1 on error. Good enough for most cases as you can put detailed messages on stdout or stderr respectively. See http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exitcodes.html.

PHP:

php <<EOF
<?php
exit("Sure, give me a string and I exit with 0! HAHAHA ha ha...\n");
EOF
echo $?
# prints 0

How a real programming language does it:

python <<EOF
import sys
sys.exit('What's that? A string? Are you stupid?')
EOF
echo $?
# prints 1

Here comes the funny part. PDO replaces the Exception code with a string [1] and Symfony 1.4 has the following code in its cli.php:

// ...
catch (Exception $e)
{
  if (!isset($application))
  {
    throw $e;
  }

  $application->renderException($e);
  $statusCode = $e->getCode();

  exit(is_numeric($statusCode) && $statusCode ? $statusCode : 1);
}

So any task that dies because of an SQL Error returns with exit code 0. Good luck finding this in your CI jobs.

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