Shell Programming and Scripting

According to different articles on the web, its still a shell script even though its written in php or are they wrong?

I guess I can conclude it has nothing to do with the environment variables after all?

They are quite wrong. It would be interesting to get links to those different articles.

Here you go:
PHPBuilder.com, the best resource for PHP tutorials, templates, PHP manuals, content management systems, scripts, classes and more.

The point of that article is that you can use PHP to write other things than web pages. If you put #!/usr/local/bin/php -q as the first line of the script, you can use PHP as a regular command-line scripting language. Page 5 of the article explains how you can mix PHP and sh in the same file by embedding a PHP script inside a bash script, or vice versa; but that still doesn't mean you can mix them freely as if they were the same language.

(The author seems to fail to realize that he could single-quote the here document so that he would not have to backslash-escape the variable names in the embedded PHP script:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
echo This is the Bash section of the code.

/usr/local/bin/php -q << 'EOF'
<?php
	$myVar = "PHP";
	print("This is the $myVar section of the code.\n");
?>
EOF

The same techniques are routinely used for embedding sed or awk or Perl or SQL inside shell scripts.)

Thank you, but with lines like "While PHP as a shell script..." its easy to get confused right?

Anyway, we are getting side tracked here. We have concluded that its not a real shell script, so the shell environment variables are not really important and can't cause the problem.

The environment that the PHP script receives might very well still be the problem. You can create a sh wrapper to set up things the way you like, and invoke that from cron.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
PATH=/ick/y/poo:$PATH
export PATH
/path/to/mailer.php

I dont know what a sh wrapper is, can you explain? Do I need to create a new file, fx wrapper.sh and insert code like the sample in your post and the call that script before my other script?