Benefit of running command-line PHP with the “-f” argument

Question

I have been trying to figure out why some of my shell scripts alternate between using the parser option. Some list the PHP command like this:

php -f indexer.php

While other just use:

php indexer.php

I did a series of tests trying to see if the results varied based on PHP functionality but I haven't been able to see a difference.

The documentation states " The -f is optional and may be omitted - providing just the filename to execute is sufficient. "

http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.options.php

So when would you use it?

Answer 1

About the only useful purpose for -f is to explicitly indicate which of the command line args is the script to be executed:

php foo.php bar.php

While PHP would execute the FIRST filename encountered on the command line and leave the rest as arguments for that first script, putting it as

php -f foo.php bar.php

makes it that wee little bit more obvious.