Thread:Help talk:Composer/Strange error - composer misinterpreting 'require' as an input file

My CPANEL interface doesn't allow .phar files, so I've had to unpack composer.phar and run it directly. It was working, but I've now got this strange behaviour:

Error message: " PHP: syntax error, unexpected '(' in /home/kchcl200/public_html/wiki/extensions/Composer/bin/composer on line 3 Could not open input file: require " Command: cd www/wiki;php-cli -c extensions/Composer/bin/composer require mediawiki/semantic-media-wiki "~1.9.2"

The file structure is:

public_html/wiki/extensions/Composer bin composer composer.json res composer-schema.json spdx-identifier.json src Composer bootstrap.php Composer Autoload Command Config Console Application.php HtmlOutputFormatter.php ...

I suspect it's something to do with the:

use Composer\Console\Application;

That's the third line of composer.php - but I don't know php, so I'm not familiar with what the back-slashes are supposed to be.

I also think that, in this case, trying to fix the code is probably the wrong approach.

Hence my question here.