this is actually a documentation problem.

the correct command should be

'./configure'    --enable-cli     --disable-cgi   --disable-apxs

This is  not true. Simply doing './configure --disable-cgi' gives you CLI. There isn't such option as '--disable-apxs'..
You propably used unclean sources.

The sources used are fine, I downloaded them direct from php.net and verified the md5.

The documentation on the options is incomplete.

I tried --without-apxs because even though it is not documented, it is symmetrical to the option --with-apxs  which is documented, but that did not work.  Also, not saying anything about apxs at all did not work either.  Everything I tried, the ./configure failed.  

After entering this bug and thinking about it some more, it occurred to me to try  --disable-apxs   and did discover that it was the only thing which produced the desired behavior of a CLI only build.  And that's when I changed the category to a documentation bug.  Anything else results in the error: "Sorry, I was not able to successfully run APXS."  I get that error even though I have not specified --with-apxs. 

php by default is trying to build the apxs version even when it is not requested.

I note in the change log that there have been some recent changes to the "make".  perhaps this problem is newly introduced.

Also my actual goal was to build both CGI and CLI at the same time, but for the purpose of this bug I decided to simplify and isolate as much as possible.

# ./configure --disable-cgi 
or
# ./configure --without-apxs2

Both work just fine here. You're simply doing something wrong or I'm high on crack. :)

I even removed Apache from my test machine to be sure.
Any other SAPIs aren't enabled by default except for CLI and CGI.
With plain ./configure without any options you get both.

Please it with this latest snapshot instead of 5.2.3:
http://snaps.php.net/php5.2-latest.tar.gz

Hi Jani, Thank you for looking at this, I appreciate your efforts.

Using the snap from  2007-08-26 at 04:30   
I can not reproduce the problem.   Therefore the problem has been fixed in cvs and that's why you aren't seeing it.

However, in the release version of php 5.2.3  using the following command continues to result in the error message and abort as described.

./configure --without-apxs2  

What appears to be happening is that "without" is being mistaken for a "with" request.  And since the default path does not match the actual path it aborts with a not found error.

The reason I was specifying "--without-apxs2"  is because I wanted to make certain that apxs would not be built and clobber my previous apxs which has different/incompatible configure options.  My assumption was that because the cgi gets built even when it is not requested, that the apxs was also probably being built.  Now that I understand better how to interpret the many thousands of lines of output...   I see that apxs is not being built unless specifically requested.  I do not recall seeing this fact (that cgi gets built and apxs does not, by default) anywhere in the documentation.

Fixed -> closed. And never was really a bug since you're not supposed to  use --without-apxs2 and only SAPIs enabled by default are CLI/CGI since forever including 5.2.3.