[PATCH] Send errors to stderr instead of stdout

Two technical points:

1/ You must not use php_stream_from_zval except within a
PHP_FUNCTION unless you really know what you're doing. Use
php_stream_from_zval_no_verify instead, and manually check to see if
you ended up with a valid stream pointer. The segfault problem you
had was because you were misusing this macro.

2/ Why not simply fprintf(stderr, STR_PRINT(prepend_string) ........ ?

and a third SAPI compatibility point: stderr is not consistently
handled across SAPI, so stdout is the "best" place for the error
output. If your patch were to be accepted, it would require that you
check if the active sapi is CLI before sending the output to stderr,
instead of piping it into the output buffer.

Of course, breaking the test suite for CLI isn't the best news either;
it relies on the output ending up in stdout.

--Wez.

Hi,

while developping some shell scripts with PHP-cli I've got annoyed that PHP
sends its error messages to STDOUT instead of STDERR so I've written the
attached patch.

I see two possible problems with this patch where I'm not sure if one of the
is really critical:

• it uses the PHP STDERR constant defined by PHP-cli. If one doesn't use
  PHP-cli and defines a constant with this name which is not a stream-resource
  PHP segfaults. (How do I check wether a resource is a stream-resource?)
• there are a few tests checking for error messages and at least
  ext/standard/tests/file/userstreams.phpt failed for me after applying this
  patch but other tests testing for error messages worked and I'm not sure why
  they behave different. (some I/O-Buffers?)

The patch was developped and tested on my i686-pc-linux-gnu box against HEAD.

johannes

PS: The PHP version of HEAD is still 5.0.1-dev but should be 5.1.0-dev, since
5.0.1 is afaik developped in the PHP_5_0 branch. I also added a patch to
update these numbers.