It appears that as of 5.3.0, --enable-force-cgi-redirect is not a valid configure option. A quick review of the 5.3.0 code indicates that it the logic previously enabled by specifying the --enable-force-cgi-redirect configure option is being built into php by default.
Case 2: using cgi.force_redirect
The configuration directive cgi.force_redirect prevents anyone from calling PHP directly with a URL like http://my.host/cgi-bin/php/secretdir/script.php. Instead, PHP will only parse in this mode if it has gone through a web server redirect rule. PHP older than 4.2.0 used --enable-force-cgi-redirect compile time option for this.
Usually the redirection in the Apache configuration is done with the following directives:
Action php-script /cgi-bin/php AddHandler php-script .php
This option has only been tested with the Apache web server, and relies on Apache to set the non-standard CGI environment variable REDIRECT_STATUS on redirected requests. If your web server does not support any way of telling if the request is direct or redirected, you cannot use this option and you must use one of the other ways of running the CGI version documented here.
Note that force-redirect doesn't work with IIS at all; it'll tell you to go away, as IIS doesn't supply the right variables to PHP.
php.ini tells you to turn it off, so make sure you do.
Contrary to what was said, you can use arbitrary names for your MIME Type ...
However there's a restriction as it must be a valid MIME Type.
For instance, this is working perfectly :
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php4
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php5 .php
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php6 .php6
solaris 9 php4.4.0
i have found you can't use arbitrary names ie.
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
works
#AddHandler php4-script .php
won't do must be
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php
