How to use the PHP interactive shell

Question

I\'m using Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit and I want to use the PHP interactive shell:

php -a

But it doesn\'t seem to work very well, a lot of syntax

Answer 1

This is what you'll get when the php5-readline package is not installed. Assuming that's your problem you can fix it by running this command:

sudo apt-get install php5-readline