composer php - Trying to set PHP command line option produces weird output

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I'm trying to work around the Composer memory limit issue, and using the answer from this question Composer update memory limit.

But this is what happens:

$ php -d memory_limit=-1 /usr/local/bin/composer require foo/bar

/usr/bin/env php -d allow_url_fopen=On -d detect_unicode=Off /usr/local/Cellar/composer/1.0.0-alpha8/libexec/composer.phar $*

What is going on here?

I don't want a fix to the Composer problem, I've found another way to deal with that. My question is specifically about what this output means and why it's happening.