This multiple stage type of processing, similar to a stairway, allows convenient processing of a variable number of arguments.

Registers the function named by function to be executed when script processing is complete.

After processing a request, any semaphores acquired by the process but not explicitly released will be released automatically and a warning will be generated.

GECOS is an obsolete term that refers to the finger information field on a Honeywell batch processing system. The field, however, lives on, and its contents have been formalized by POSIX. The field contains a comma separated list containing the user's full name, office phone, office number, and home phone number. On most systems, only the user's full name is available.

The default is to build PHP as a CGI program. This creates a commandline interpreter, which can be used for CGI processing, or for non web related PHP scripting. If you are running a web server PHP has module support for, you should generally go for that solution for performance reasons. However, the CGI version enables Apache users to run different PHP enabled pages under different user ids. Please make sure you read through the Security chapter if you are going to run PHP as a CGI.