PHP Parse error on WP-CLI, not on web server

Question

I have a network of over a hundred sites and I try to use wp-cli to make bulk changes to many of these. Particularly to their wp_x_options table via wp --url=site.url option update

However, wp commands fail with several of my files, severely limiting the usefulness of the tool, particularly when trying to run with a list of urls | xargs wp --url={} ... because after the first failure, the rest are skipped.

The error I get is always the same:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected end of file in ... /functions.php

This error does not happen when loading the pages normally via the browser. My functions.php files are perfectly OK. Some of them don't have a closing ?> tag but that can't be the problem since many of these (lacking closing ?>) run OK with wp-cli.

Any thoughts?

WP-CLI 0.18.0 Wordpress 4.0.1 PHP 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.4 (cli) php.ini has error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT display_errors = Off

Answer 1

As noted in https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli/issues/1754#issuecomment-91361340, I figured this one out. It turns out it wasn't wp-cli's fault at all.

My confusion arose from the fact that I'm running a web server with nginx and php fpm, which has it's own php.ini . wp commands run php (cli) directly on the host and so the config can be different. In this case my php cli didn't allow short_open_tag (

Solution

Just enabled

short_open_tag=On

in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini p.s. this is an aws ubuntu box