Where is php ?

A question came up on the phpwomen channel today about how to find the path to php executable for use in cron scripts. The answer that came back very quickly to use which or whereis.

It turns out that the server in question is a shared host with a control panel for access to cron and ftp to upload your files. A test proved that shell_exec() wasn’t going to work too. After discussing it for a little while and trying a few combinations, we came up with putting:

echo `whereis php` > DIR/whereisphp.txt

into the cron script control panel and set it to run in 2 minutes time. Then it was just a case of looking in the file and discovering that the php binary was in /usr/local/bin.

And this post is here to save me a little bit of time when no doubt I’ll run into the same problem in a year’s time…