Why doesn't drush respond to commands after install Setup

I just followed the directions on the drush website for installing drush.

I performed the command php -r "readfile('http://files.drush.org/drush.phar');" &gt; drush

Then attempted the next command php drush core-status which resulted in lots of text basically saying "Permission Denied".

So I went ahead and performed the next direction which makes the scripts executable. chmod +x drush

The Problem

I then attempted php drush core-status again.

Now the console just sits there when I type the command. It displays nothing and never released back to prompt. I had to ctrl+c to free up the console.

The Question

What am I doing wrong here? Are their dependencies on drush that are not listed in the install document? Is their some way to see errors that are not printed to the console?

I was using php 5.4 originally but updated to 5.5 and that did not solve the problem. CentOS 6.7.
At the time of my comment the phar for drush wasn't working correctly. That very well may be fixed by now, however, I've still found installing drush via composer to be the easiest solution.