i do not understand your questions very clearly. i will answer your questions based on my own understanding.
For example, the shell script name is myshellscript, i assume you use C/TC shell.
on command line
ocor>:./myshellscript arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4
Then in your script, you can use the following statements to set arg1, arg2... as the arguments of your php program.
/xxx/php xxx.php $1 $2 $3 # the $1 is the first arg, $2 is the 2nd and so on, $0 is the script name. you can use echo $0 $1 $2 $3 to output the arg
you can download the "UNIX® Shells by Example Fourth Edition" ebook which is very good for shell programming beginner.