How to intentionally cause a fatal error in PHP script?
Bit late but this is a guaranteed natural fatal error:
Call an undefined function, eg:
noSuchFunction();
Or if you want this to be executed when you are in 'test' mode only, then put it into an eval
if($isTestMode==1){
eval("noSuchFunction();");
}
Note: With the trigger_error() function the problem is that if you are using set_error_handler() it ceases to be fatal - your error handler will decide what to do with it.
I believe this is what you're looking for:
trigger_error("Oops!", E_USER_ERROR);
Docs: http://php.net/manual/en/function.trigger-error.php
E_USER_ERROR is pretty much equal to E_ERROR, which is a fatal runtime error.