PHP is a programming language designed to be embedded into web pages. Shmop is an easy to use set of functions that allows PHP to read, write, create and delete Unix SysV-style shared memory segments. While developing a search deamon we needed a php based front end to communicate the deamon via SHM. PHP already had a shared memory extention (sysvshm) written by Christian Cartus , unfortunatly this extention was designed with PHP only in mind and offers high level features which are extremly bothersome for basic SHM we had in mind. After spending a day trying to reverse engineer and figure out the format of sysvshm we decided that it would be much easier to add our own extention to php for simple SHM operations, we were right :)).