Tuesday, September 15, 2009

How to recursively check syntax of PHP files

The executable of PHP supports the '-l' option, that checks the syntax instead of parsing the file.
Using the command 'find', it's possibile to do a interesting operation: syntax checking of all the files recursively, to avoid parse errors in some script !!

find ./ -type f -name \*.php -exec php -l {} \; ";

the result will be a list of files, example:

No syntax errors detected in ./codebase/controller/competition.inc.php
No syntax errors detected in ./codebase/controller/feed_data.inc.php
Errors parsing ./codebase/controller/site/contact.inc.php
No syntax errors detected in ./codebase/controller/compare_prices.inc.php


We can improve the script and print only the file with suntax errors using 'grep'

find ./ -type f -name \*.php -exec php -l {} \; | grep "Errors parsing ";

To launch it from a PHP script

passthru('find ./ -type f -name \*.php -exec php -l {} \; | grep "Errors parsing " ');

Updated: To skip .svn directories add the option :
-not -regex '.*/.svn/*.*'

1 comment:

  1. Great one-liner. I found it's a little nicer to see the specific error:
    find ./ -type f -name \*.php -exec php -l {} \; | grep "Parse error:";

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