The lint utility you wish `php -l` was out of the box. Lint check multiple PHP files with a single command.

phplint.sh

function php_lint
{
    for arg in $(seq $#)
    do  
        # Use find to iterate over directories recursively
        if [ -d "${!arg}" ]; then
            find "${!arg}" -name '*.php' -exec php -l "{}" ";"
        # Just run normal files and symlinks through php -l individually
        elif [ -f "${!arg}" -o -h "${!arg}" ]; then
            php -l "${!arg}"
        # Skip over anything else
        else
            echo 'Skipping bogus argument' 1>&2
        fi
    done
}

This function is a drop-in replacement for php -l that is 1000x better. It can easily be turned into an executable. It can handle directories, files and any number of arguments. Give it a try

php_lint file1.php directory-with-php-files symlink.php

For the directory searches, the file name extensions are hardcoded to .php. That's just how I roll, but feel free to customize ;)

The find will only lint files within a directory one at a time. Something else you might like, which I found pretty cool, would be running the directory segment through xargs and adding some parallelism. Take a peak at this approach.