This scripts are technical not required but provided for the ease of use. Imagine you have to type every time you want to build your project:
php -qC /path/to/phing/bin/phing.php -verbose all distro snapshot
Indeed that is not very elegant. Furthermore if you are lax in setting your environment variables these script can guess the proper variables for you. However you should always set them.
The scripts are platform dependent, so you will find shell scripts for
Unix
like platforms (sh) as well as the batch scripts for
Windows
platforms. If you set-up your path properly you can
call Phing everywhere in your system with this command-line (referring to the above
example):
phing -v2 all distro