Hello! I just joined the list to ask these questions. I may hang around to be helped and also to help others. I appologize for dumping these questions on you, but I need quick answers and this seemed to be the best way to get them. If you can provide answers, that's fine and I will be happy. If you'd like some background, I have provided optional reading below the questions.
(...Please don't shoot me or respond with RTFM. Please DO give me specific URLs to read if you like, and if you know that they contain the answers...) 1 - Can PHP be used as a batch processor under MS-Windows? 2 - I downloaded php-4.2.1-installer.exe and php-4.2.1-Win32.zip. I ran php-4.2.1-installer.exe to the point where I got this dialog: Title Bar: "Mail Configuration" Query #1: "Please enter the address of your SMTP server." Textbox #1: "localhost" Query #2: "Please enter the 'from' address for the mail function." Textbox #2: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" I don't know what is being asked. What do I do now? 3 - To run PHP for command line scripting, do I need Apache? I think I do, though here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/installation.php, is found this: "If you are also interested to use PHP for command line scripting ... you need no server and no browser", but the installer seems to demand a mail server (see question 2, above), so I'm very confused. 4 - What run time environment does PHP for command line scripting expect and how much of it, a, is installed by php-4.2.1-installer.exe, and b, is found in php-4.2.1-Win32.zip? My Objectives ============= I seek an alternative to CGI and PHP seems to be just that. I have never written CGI. I have an e-smith SME server 5 box that I'd like to put on the net as a general purpose gateway/firewall/www-server/mail-handler and on which I hope to process PHP-enhanced, server-side HTML. I'd like to learn PHP under MS-Windows first, and perhaps use it to do useful, batch type things, bulk processing email 'inbox' files for example, while traveling the path to PHP enlightenment. About Me ======== I tried to read the PHP documentation and gave up. I don't have half a lifetime to figure out merely whether I'm on the right track. I've been to http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php and couldn't understand it. I'm 55 years old, and an electronics (hardware) engineer primarily in the area of system architecture, primarily in Silicon Valley (though I live in Ohio now). I know most modern languages (C, Java, etc.) and many (archaic?) ones (spitbol, fortran, etc.). I write a lot of awfully complex Javascripts using a lot of RegExps and "<var> = <t_or_f> ? <new_val_if_t> : <new_val_if_f>" constructs, for example. I have some experience with UNIX System 5, Minix, Theos, and FreeBSD. All of my experience with *NIX has been bad. Generally, my experience has not been that there is too little documentation, but that there is too much, that it is poorly written, and that it is in desperate need of a competent editor who knows how to write syntactically correct and logically constructed English -- I tried to volunteer as an editor to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and got dismissed as a crackpot. *NIX Man pages make me feel stupid and are generally unreadable, IMHO. My problem is that I am missing the *NIX gene, a condition that makes it impossible for me to parse sentences that have been written by *NIX hackers. In the last two or three years I have read nearly half of the IETF RFCs and have understood everything they contained, so I know that my condition is not fatal. Thanks Very Much! -- Mark Filipak, Mansfield, Ohio. -- PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
