David Caunt wrote up a useful article on command line scripting;
As PHP developers, it is convenient to be able to write command line scripts in PHP. In doing so, you will almost certainly want access to Zend Framework components and their configurations as if you are writing a normal MVC app, but without invoking the MVC stack and without loading unnecessary resources. I’ve seen solutions where actions are exposed as controller actions and called by wget – these are counter-intuitive, inefficient, and will suffer from max execution timeouts and other problems.
Zend_Applicaton to the rescue
Lets start with our website’s public/index.php – the script which sets up and launches an application. It looks roughly like this:
full article here; Easy command line scripts with Zend Application.