Problem:
Even after checking all normal error display directives you still can’t get any errors to display on the command line when running a PHP CLI script.

Solution
Run your command line script with the -d display_errors flag:

$ php -d display_errors myscript.php


Note: The PHP you get with Centos 5 Apache is built with the display_errors directive hard-coded to ‘off’ and AFAIK there’s nothing you can do in php.ini to override this other than build your own PHP from source.