PEAR is installed by default with PHP version 4.3.0 and above. You'll only need to install it if you're restricted to earlier versions. Information on how to manually install PEAR can be found at http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php.
With root permissions, run "pear list" to see a listing of PEAR packages already installed on the system.
[root@zaemis www]# pear list Installed packages: =================== Package Version State Archive_Tar 1.1 stable Console_Getopt 1.0 stable DB 1.5.0RC2 stable HTTP 1.2.1 stable Mail 1.1.2 stable Net_SMTP 1.2.3 stable Net_Socket 1.0.1 stable PEAR 1.2.1 stable XML_Parser 1.0.1 stable XML_RPC 1.0.4 stable
You will receive an error message saying a lock file could not be created and permission has been denied if you do not have root permissions.
[bluephoenix@zaemis www]$ pear list could not create lock file: failed to open stream: Permission denied
We'll use the Benchmark package to introduce ourselves to the world of PEAR. It isn't installed by default so we'll need to install it ourselves. To install a package, run "pear install package-name".
