How to pass parameters / arguments to your PHP script via the command line

If you want to be able to assign variable names for the values being passed in like php script.php -pvalue1, getopt() is the way to do it. Lets look at a different version of the script now >

$val = getopt("p:");

There are some major differences here. First with getopt() you must specify which command line argument you want to retrieve. In the case of this script, it looks for the "-name" argument, that's specified by the "name:" value passed to getopt(). The colon (:) means that the parameter must have a value. If you're used to doing something like "script.php?name=Name&roll=Roll" this is an equivalent for the command line.

php script.php --name=test --roll="03 d"

$val = getopt("name:roll:");