New Tutorial: Finding PEAR on your server

Hello, I've seen lots of users post questions to some webforum community I'm part of that deal with asking how to access PEAR*. In response to this, I authored a getting started with PEAR tutorial (this refers to calling PEAR, not necessary how PEAR works, etc... it's just meant as a quick way to help shared hosting users integrate pear into their applications, and discourage frustration). Rationale: Besides seeing the same question answered many different ways on many different forums, I'd like to let users go through a little learning before they get the answer to this. That way, they know what is going on and won't have to ask this again if some security rule changes. But don't worry. It's pretty much just copy and paste for them. Actual work to learn is little except for repeating commands. =) To find the PEAR directory path, normally I'd do this by using 'pear' command: $ pear config-get php_dir Sometimes if I'm on different hosts, they have different rules on what goes with PEAR. I can't just use PHP to detect the pear path for what I'm doing. "Most of the web servers are configured with 'safe_mode = on'. So, it's impossible to used popen, system or pasthru PHP commands. Moreover, even if 'safe_mode' is Off, there is one another problem, users haven't always execution rights on the 'pear' command :-(" Furthermore, I don't want to get badgered by my webhost for disclosing file paths, so I give instructions to users on how to find them. I've posted the tutorial here: http://forums.hostrocket.com/showthread.php?p=96412 I don’t know what format to convert it to, so please review and maybe we can work from there. Regards, Krystian. I've worked with Valéry Febvre of eeStock to concoct good directions/anticipate problems to find PEAR configurations. Please reply the message along to him as well: vfebvre@easter-eggs.com * An example of this is shown in the many previously unanswered questions on this topic: http://forums.hostrocket.com/showthread.php?t=12749 http://forums.hostrocket.com/showthread.php?t=11832 http://forums.hostrocket.com/showthread.php?t=10363 http://forums.hostrocket.com/showthread.php?t=10337 Now this is for one host, I'm sure users at other hosts may encounter the same problem.