Although it’s been around for years, the PEAR Package Manager is constantly the focus of ongoing enhancements. That said, you’ll want to occasionally check for updates to the system. Doing so is a trivial process on both the Unix and Windows platforms; just execute the installation process anew. This will restart the installation process, overwriting the previously installed Package Manager version.
Using the PEAR Package Manager
The PEAR Package Manager allows you to browse and search the contributions, view recent releases, and download packages. It executes via the command line, using the following syntax:
To get better acquainted with the Package Manager, open up a command prompt and execute the following:
%>pear
You’ll be greeted with a list of commands and some usage information. This output is pretty long, so it won’t be reproduced here. Instead you’ll be introduced to just the most commonly used commands. If you’re interested in learning more about one of the commands not covered in the remainder of this chapter, execute that command in the Package Manager, supplying thehelpparameter like so:
%>pear help <command>
Tip If PEAR doesn’t execute because the command is not found, you need to add the executable directory to your system path.
Viewing an Installed PEAR Package
Viewing the packages installed on your machine is simple; just execute the following:
%>pear list
Here’s some sample output:
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Installed packages: =================== Package Version State Archive_Tar 1.3.1 stable Console_Getopt 1.2 stable HTML_AJAX 0.4.0 alpha Mail 1.1.10 stable Net_SMTP 1.2.8 stable Net_Socket 1.0.6 stable XML_Parser 1.2.7 stable XML_RPC 1.2.2 stable
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Please check back next week for the conclusion to this article.
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