pipe mail / get input from stdin

Can someone explain, why this is working when started as a shell script manually on the shell (saves input from stdin properly to a file) but not when pipeing (e.g. utilizing /etc/aliases)an email into it (creates an empty file!)? On the other hand, the second (unix shell) script below works just fine when triggered by an email. The line in /etc/aliases is something like: xyz: "|/path/to/my/script" [Of course, I have PHP as CGI..] Thank you very much!!! dk ------------------ PHP SHELL SCRIPT -------------- #!/usr/local/bin/php -q <? // tried all of these but without success! // $fp = fopen("php://stdin", "r"); // $fp = fopen("/dev/fd/0", "r"); $fp = fopen("/dev/stdin","r"); while(($buf=fgets($fp, 512)) != false) { $dump .= $buf; } fclose($fp); $fpf = fopen("/tmp/mail.txt","w"); fputs($fpf,$dump); fclose($fpf); ?> The above should work like this one: ------------------ SHELL SCRIPT -------------- #!/bin/sh LOGDIR="/tmp/mail.txt" # # Read stdin # while read LINE do echo $LINE >>$LOGDIR done