Please paste exact output of running "pear"

also, please verify: did you choose to use php-cgi.exe instead of php.exe?

The cgi version is not recommended for PEAR for this exact reason

There's no output with or without arguments to the "pear" command. "pear" returns a once, exit code (echo $?) is 255.

May be. But php uses autoconf/configure scripts. So why isnt't it configured so that "pear" command uses right "php" binary automatically? Also CLI version is not installed by "make install" at all.

How exactly did you configure/install PHP?

- Extracted the source package to "/usr/local/php-5.1.1"
- cd to that
- mkdir "lokal"
- ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal --enableforce-cgi-redirect --enable-discard-path --disable-ipv6 --with-openssl --enable-mbstring --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql-4.0.20/lokal --with-pgsql=/usr/local/postgresql-8.1.0/lokal --disable-inline-optimization
- make
- make install

Output from "make install" is:

Installing PHP SAPI module:       cgi
Installing PHP CGI into: /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/bin/
Installing build environment:     /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/lib/php/build/
Installing header files:          /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/include/php/
Installing helper programs:       /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/bin/
  program: phpize
  program: php-config
Installing man pages:             /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/man/man1/
  page: phpize.1
  page: php-config.1
Installing PEAR environment:      /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/lib/php/
[PEAR] Archive_Tar    - already installed: 1.3.1
[PEAR] Console_Getopt - already installed: 1.2
[PEAR] PEAR           - already installed: 1.4.5
Wrote PEAR system config file at: /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/etc/pear.conf
You may want to add: /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/lib/php to your php.ini include_path
Installing PDO headers:          /usr/local/php-5.1.1/lokal/include/php/ext/pdo/

Greg, obviously .phar has to check if it's CLI or CGI.
Please, fix it.

this has nothing to do with phar, it is PEAR.  We have a conundrum, because PHP 4.2 simply doesn't work if you pass -dregister_argc_argv=On, and 4.2 is the earliest officially supported version.

As the question of supporting PHP 4.2 is a political and not a technical decision, I have to now drag over to pear-core and try to solve this one with the other developers.

In the mean time, perhaps it is time to be sure that the cli version of PHP is installed with "make install"!!

Now I did "make install", renamed "php" binary to "php-cgi" and did "make install-cli" for the CLI binary.
Then I changed the "Action ..." statement in Apache httpd.conf to reflect the new CGI binary path.
Perhaps that is not correct doing, but it works.

Also thanks for your very fast answers!
Bye

Since this is about PHP 5.1.1 and this is a PEAR bug -> bogus.