The PHP version is not correctly detected I'm running Drush on a host that has multiple versions of PHP installed. By default, php --version would give you 5.2.x, but php53 and php54 are also available. So in my .bash_profile I have alias php='php53' (php --version = 5.3.13), which makes Drush work for some commands.

However, I still get "Your command line PHP installation is too old. Drush requires at least PHP 5.3.2" messages for some very useful commands.

A couple of really annoying instances:


drush pm-update will report that it has backed up and then updated all modules and core successfully, then return the PHP version error and restore all backups. In verbose mode, the command that comes before the error is:
php /home/[username]/drush/drush.php  --backend=2 --verbose --root=/home/[username]/webapps/drup --uri=http://[domain name]  pm-updatecode-postupdate 2&gt;&amp;1
drush archive-dump will immediately return the PHP version error


The other commands I have tried so far work fine. I'm not sure why this would be, if Drush is sometimes using the php53 binary, and other times not, or if it just has trouble detecting the version correctly, but some very important features are broken for me.
Drush doesn't use just php directly as a command, but need the full path. With the last version of Drush, you can add the following line in your .bash_profile to set which PHP you want to use.

export DRUSH_PHP=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.14/bin/php

Here is just an example of MAMP, but you can change it as well with your own path.