Question

Often times when I see PHP that is meant to be ran from the command line, it will have this line #!/usr/bin/env php at the top of the file like this…

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
    // code
?>

I was wanting to know if this is meant just for when the file is ran on a Linux/Unix system or is needed for running on Windows as well?

Answer 1

The shebang line is required for auto-detection of the type of script. It enables this sort of usage:

[pfisher ~]$ chmod +x run-me.php
[pfisher ~]$ ./run-me.php

That line is not needed if you pass the filename as an argument to the php interpreter, like so:

[pfisher ~]$ php run-me.php

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Edit: replace "hashbang" with shebang.