Magento's memory limit on CLI

Recently, I noticed a command line script built for a Magento store, terminated with out of memory errors:

PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted...

As it turns out, Magento is reading the .htaccess file even if running from command line and applies any php configuration found to the script environment.

In order to fix this, find the line

php_value memory_limit 256M

and get rid of it.