Validate PHP File in linux

Saturday, April 2, 2011 EDT

by: Eric Potvin

Tags: php ubuntu linux svn

For some reason, you work on a project with a lot of PHP files and, by "chance", all the php files are in the same folder. The application does not seem to work properly due to PHP error. So the easiest way to find which files are in trouble is by calling the php client with the "-l" option. The problem is there is way too many files.

The solution is very simple:

for x in `ls *.php`; do php -l $x; done;

Let's say now you would like to perform the same operation in a SVN environment to make sure the modified or added files are valid.

First, go in the project folder:

cd /var/www/project_y/trunk/

* or can be any other folder

Get the list of modified or added files:

svn status

That will output something like:

M      class/Main.class.php
M      action.php
A      access.php

Now, unfortunately you cannot perform the for x in `svn status`; do php -l $x; done;. The result will output an error saying: the file M cannot be found or open.

M
Could not open input file: M
action.php
No syntax errors detected in action.php

To fix that problem, we need to use the sed command to remove the extra characters we don't really need.

svn status | sed -e 's/M      //g' | sed -e 's/A      //g'

The output result will look something like:

class/Main.class.php
action.php
access.php

Now, we can use the for command to validate the modified or added file:

for x in `svn status | sed -e 's/M      //g' | sed -e 's/A      //g'`; do php -l $x; done;

The output result will look something like:

No syntax errors detected in class/Main.class.php
No syntax errors detected in action.php
No syntax errors detected in access.php

easy no?

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