I sometimes want to post samples of PHP scripts on my website. Since the site web server is configured to parse files that end in .php, that means that simply linking to the PHP file will try to parse it instead of displaying its contents. In the past, I’ve always made a copy of the file with a .txt extension to have it displayed as text/plain. That way is kindof clumsy though. If a user wants to save the file, they download it as a .txt and have to rename it to .php.
Fortunately, Apache has a way to do about anything. To configure it to not parse a specific PHP file, you can use this in your Apache configuration:
<Files "some.file.php"> RemoveHandler .php ForceType text/plain </Files>
If you have AllowOverride FileInfo enabled, this can also be placed in a .htaccess file. It should work for other file types like .cgi or .pl files as well. You can substitute a FilesMatch directive to have it match multiple file names base on a regular expression match.