[vox-tech] when is an html image "sent"?

[Philip Neustrom]

nope.  just have it expire after 20 seconds or something.  you're
keeping a log of the captacha phrases, too, so just delete them
together.  --Philip Neustrom

On 12/16/05, Peter Jay Salzman <p at dirac.org> wrote:
> hi all,
>
> i'm writing a blogging system called peetblog.  you can see a demo at
> http://www.dirac.org/blog.  i haven't really linked to it much because it's
> still under active development.
>
> one of the features is a captcha system (an image file of letters/numbers
> that someone needs to type in to comment on a post).  the code looks
> something like this:
>
>
>
>    ///   Captcha
>    $retval = createImage();
>    $filename = $retval['filename'];
>    $passkey  = $retval['passkey'];
>    $smarty->assign('filename', $filename);
>    $smarty->assign('passkey', $passkey);
>
>    $smarty->assign('id', $the_id);
>    $smarty->assign('login', $_SESSION['user']->login);
>    $smarty->assign('email', $_SESSION['user']->email);
>    $smarty->assign('www', $_SESSION['user']->www);
>    $smarty->display('permalink_C.tpl');
>
>
>
>    // Footer
>    //
>    $smarty->assign('me', $selfUrl);
>    $smarty->assign('rss', "$pb_url/$pb_rss");
>    $smarty->display('footer.tpl');
>    unlink($filename);
>    exit(0);
>
>
>
> footer.tpl contains the ending "</body></html>", so the page content ends
> right there.  The <img> tag is contained in the permalink_C.tpl template.
>
> The problem is that when:
>
>    unlink($filename);
>
> is used to delete the temporary image file, the image doesn't appear on the
> webpage.  however, if i don't use "unlink", then the image files tend to
> collect until i hand delete them.
>
>
> i suppose at some point, the image needs to be sent from server to client.
> when that happens, it would be ok to delete the image file.  i was *hoping*
> that this would happen immediately after </html> is sent, but it appears
> that i'm wrong.
>
> is there some kind of technique I can use to make sure the image file gets
> deleted after it's shipped off to the client?
>
> thanks,
> pete
> _______________________________________________
> vox-tech mailing list
> vox-tech at lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
>