pear.exe

In the Windows environment, pear command uses %SystemRoot%\pear.ini as a default configuration file. Since it is a system global file, pear.ini is corrupted when there are some installation of php/pear.

Once you put pear.exe at the same directory of pear.bat, each pear command use independent configuration file.

I carefully implements pear.exe not to depend on C Run-Time Libraries (CRT). Not depending on msvcrXXX.dll, it doesn't require any version of VC++ Redistributable Packages to be installed.

Implementation

pear.exe just do two things below.

1. Set %PHP_PEAR_SYSCONF_DIR% to parent directory of pear.exe, if not set
2. Call pear.bat that exists at the same directory of pear.exe

When you type "pear", pear.exe is executed prior to pear.bat because of %PATHEXT% setting.