When trying to determine whether or not something was piped into a command line script, it is not smart to do a fgets(STDIN), because it will wait indefenitely if nothing is piped. Instead, I found ftell on STDIN to be very handy: it will return an integer of zero when something was piped, and nothing if nothing was piped to the script.
#!/usr/bin/php4 -q
<?
$tell = ftell(STDIN);
if (is_integer($tell)==true)
{echo "Something was piped: ".fread(STDIN,256)."\n";}
else
{echo "Nothing was piped\n";}
?>