include file problems

Anon

Hello everyone--
I have a simple question about including a file on a Unix machine. I have PHP4 installed on it and I'm trying to include a file that holds passwords to databases etc. I'm using the full path which is:

/httpd/php/application/application_dev_prod.php

Also, my code to include the file is as follows:

include ("/httpd/php/application/application_dev_prod.php");

Lastly, here is the include error I am getting:

Warning: Failed opening '/httpd/php/application/application_dev_prod.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /httpd/htdocs/index.php on line 3

Thanks for any help!
Jay

Anon

You've just discovered one of PHP's security related features. To kind of keep php code in it's box, the include files are found by looking in the php include file path.

In your php.ini file (in /usr/local/lib under RH linux) there's a line like this:

include_path = "./:/www/include"

This is a : seperated list of places for php scripts to look for include files. Mine has ./, which is the current directory, and /www/include

Just make sure that you have an entry for whereever your file is and you don't need a path, it will look for you. So, if you had /httpd/php/application in your php.ini file, you could just do a:

include "application_dev_prod.php"; to include the file.

Anon

The behavior i'm seeing is quite strange.

include_path = "/home/myHome/public_html";

when I try to include a file like this
include('/myfile.php');

it tries to get it from the system root, not from public_html.

However, if I go like this:
include('myfile.php');
it tries to include it from the current working directory.

Now the problem is, I have include files which include other files. SOOOOO the first file ALWAYS looks for the included file using the current working directory, but the working dir changes based on where the include is being called from.

search/index.php calls ../global/header.php. that works IF I access search/index.php directly, but if I try to include search/index.php from say /search/anotherDir/, it looks for header.php in /search/global/header.php.

I need a way to be able to do includes relative to root, but php doesn't seem to work that way.