PHP CLI unable to execute in subdir

[FieldingBlue]

Hiho,
This one has me stumped. I've been coding for a while and never seen this sort of problem before. This issue has occured on an openSuse box.

PHP from the command line reports that it is unable to find php files in a particular sub-directory. But everywhere else things work fine. There are no differences that I can identify between permissions. There is no .htaccess file. I've checked the php.ini file and there are no prescriptive settings that prohibit the offending sub-directory. The problem exists even as Super User.
Below is the output from a session that highlights my issue. The same test.php file is included in the current directory, a 'test' sub-directory and the offending 'projects' sub-directory.
The script permissions are the same in each directory. Also the permissions for the directories are identical.
The script is simple.
The script contents are the same in each directory.
The output is different for the script in the 'projects' sub-directory. Apparently PHP cannot find the file.

If anyone has any hints I'd love to hear them.
Thanks

user@machine:~> ls -l test.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 37 May 11 07:40 test.php                                                                                                             
user@machine:~> ls -l test/test.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 37 May 11 07:41 test/test.php                                                                                                        
user@machine:~> ls -l projects/test.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 37 May 11 07:41 projects/test.php

user@machine:~> cat test.php
<?php
echo "is this thing on?\n";
?>

user@machine:~> diff test.php test/test.php
user@machine:~> diff test.php projects/test.php        
                                                                                                       
user@machine:~> php test.php                                                                                                                                  
is this thing on?                                                                                                                                            
user@machine:~> php test/test.php                                                                                                                             
is this thing on?                                                                                                                                            
user@machine:~> php projects/test.php                                                                                                                         
PHP Fatal error:  Unknown: Failed opening required 'projects/test.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php5:/usr/share/php5/PEAR') in Unknown on line 0
user@machine:~>

[QuickOldCar]

relative is no leading slash

absolute will have a leading slash

You don't want to use a relative path, an absolute path of the current directory is what you need

 

If this script isn't running from the same directory it wouldn't be able to find it, so try adding the directory path

 

You can use set_include_path()

 

Some OS are slightly different.

 

In php scripts I add this to locate the directory name and it's separator

$full_path = dirname(__FILE__) . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR."/projects/test.php";