To search your php.ini file quickly and easily with the option to use regular expressions, I tend to drop back to the cli. The reason for this is I can easily parse the output of phpinfo() with grep, and can do various things with the output, could even pass it to a script if I really wanted to.

Here is the line I use to search phpinfo()

echo "<?php phpinfo() ?>" | php | grep -i $search_string

It passes the string through the php interpreter and then searches through it with grep.

You can also do other nifty things with the shell & php + ruby especially (though I imagine python & perl work in the same way.) For instance I wanted to see if the following ruby would return the number of seconds since the epoch till now.

puts Time.now.to_i

Now I could fire up a PHP page and do something like the following

<?php
  echo "php: " . time() . "\n";
  echo "ruby: " . `ruby -e 'print Time.now.to_i'` . "\n";
?>

But what if I’ve not got a web server with PHP running on the machine I’m using? Well then I could drop back to the shell and run it through php using cat as a way to insert multiple lines, and it would look like the following

cat <<PHP | php
<?php
  echo "php: " . time() . "\n";
  echo "ruby: " . `ruby -e 'print Time.now.to_i'` . "\n";
PHP

php: 1203004463
ruby: 1203004463

Now this works, but why do I want to remember all that php, and seeing as I have to drop back to the shell to access the ruby statement, why not just let the shell do all the work? So after a few seconds thinking, I came up with this

ruby -e 'puts "ruby: #{Time.now.to_i}"' && \
  echo '<?php echo "PHP: " . time() . "\n" ?>' | php

This runs the ruby code through ruby and the php code through php without dropping back to the shell from within a language interpreter :)

Update:

Fangel pointed out php -r is the equivilent of ruby -e so the final commands could just be:

ruby -e 'puts "ruby: #{Time.now.to_i}"' && \
php -r 'echo "PHP: ".time()."\n";'