CHAPTER 16 – php.ini Name and Location

On UNIX-like systems, PHP (with back-ends other than CLI) looks for php.ini in /usr/local/lib by default. To be more "shell-ish," the CLI back-end looks for /etc/php-cli.ini by default, instead. This makes it possible to keep separate php.ini files for your web server and CLI/shell scripts, without having to specify the ­c option every time you run a PHP-driven script. Different UNIX/Linux distributions that bundle PHP often use their own default php.ini location; you can find the file used by your PHP executable with get_cfg_var("cfg_file_path").

Other Differences When PHP is running inside a web server, func- tionality, such as fork() makes little sense, because it would duplicate the entire web-server process and not just PHP. This is bad because the web server process contains lots of code that is completely unrelated to PHP, possi- bly including other web-scripting modules, such as mod_perl. In a threaded environment, it would even duplicate all the threads in that process. If the purpose of your fork is to exec another program right away, this does not mat- ter. But if you want to fork to keep running PHP code in the new process, hav- ing this extra baggage in the process can be really bad. For this reason, PHP's process control extension (pcntl) is only available in the CLI version, where a fork() call only makes a duplicate of PHP.