[vox-tech] PHP fopen() bug

[Troy Arnold]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 07:28:04AM -0800, Rod Roark wrote:
> I spent about 4 hours of my life yesterday tearing my hair
> out over this.  Built an Ubuntu (warty) system for a client
> to run some PHP and Perl applications, ran into a problem,
> and tracked it down to the simple fact that
> 
>   $fh = fopen('/tmp/test', 'w');
> 
> always fails with a "no such file or directory" error.  It
> doesn't seem to matter what the path is.
> 
> What DOES work is:
> 
>   touch('/tmp/test');
>   $fh = fopen('/tmp/test', 'w');
> 
> Has anyone heard of such a thing?  How can such a basic
> problem exist in a distribution that's been out for almost
> six months?  Yes, I have all the latest updates.

It's not just you, in the annotated docs at php.net someone mentions the
same workaround:
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php (search for RobNar)

I keep a local copy of the php documentation around, but occasionally,
the annotated online version does have some useful notes (along with
some just plain wrong info sometimes...)

And yeah, that is brain-dead behavior for fopen.  I don't understand it
why it's still an issue either.

-troy