PHP3/4 as a shell app

I've not yet done this, but I am in need of applying PHP to my admin responsibilities. I used PHP 3.0.15 off of our Apache server to so some fairly complex file reconstruction tasks which our shell/Perl guy never even finished. Took me 40 minutes, and 15 were testing. (Minutes were spent waiting for PHP.com manual pages to load...my only gripe about this wonderful technology, its developers, or anything else related to PHP. Would you gracious PHP masters be willing to maintain a documentation CVS service, or (preferably) a database with access to a scant few who could act as "documentation mirrors"? Could make accessing data easier. I would love to help coordinate such a project if that would be amernable to anyone.) Anyway, the point of my post :), is that I would like to use the PHP commandline tool I have heard so much about. Is it true that you only have to ./configure as you would an Apache module, except that you just don't set either "--with-apxs" or "--with-apache=/dir". Are there any limitations with this? And most of all, how do you pass variable to it? '$PHP_EXECUTABLE_NAME myScript.php?id=4'? Also, I'd be more inclined to have two versions of the tool: php3 and php4. Both would be linked to the MySQL libs, and both would be configured exactly the same. Are there any issues with this type of setup? TIA! Mark J. Hershenson Senior Editor, The MacOS Xclave http://xclave.macnn.com/