php -a (Interactive mode) hangs and does not run

[pythonscript]

When I run php -a, I get the message "Interactive mode enabled" in the terminal, but nothing happens. I installed php5 from the repositories, and I sincerely need this feature. I assume this has something to do with php not being compiled with the libreadline (since I've found that potential issue elsewhere) but is there a way to fix this *without* recompiling php (which is an incredibly major hassle)?

[dagon]

There is a package in the repos named php5-cli that should do the trick for you.
Package description:
This package provides the /usr/bin/php5 command interpreter, useful for
testing PHP scripts from a shell or performing general shell scripting tasks.
The following extensions are built in: bcmath bz2 calendar Core ctype date
dba dom ereg exif fileinfo filter ftp gettext hash iconv json libxml
mbstring mhash openssl pcntl pcre Phar posix readline Reflection session
shmop SimpleXML soap sockets SPL standard sysvmsg sysvsem sysvshm tokenizer
wddx xml xmlreader xmlwriter zip zlib.

[pythonscript]

The php5-cli package is already installed. That package allows you to run php scripts from the terminal with

Code: Select all

php script.php

which is different from interactive mode.

[dagon]

I'm at Mint 10
when I tried "php -a" in the terminal it prompted me to install php5-cli.
Installed it gives me a list of errors concerning symlinks ending with the message interactive shell and a prompt:php >

Here is a Debian bugreport:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=576218

[pythonscript]

Ah, ok. I had already installed php5-cli on my system before trying interactive mode, so I didn't see that error. Mint 10 is Ubuntu based, correct? I don't have this problem on my Ubuntu distributions, but I'm not using Linux Mint's Ubuntu derivatives, just the Debian one. Hopefully something will come out of that bugreport that won't involve having to compile php5 from source. I've had the problem about not being linked to libreadline on hosting platforms before, but never from a package standard to a repository.