Temporarily lock file?

[Anon]

Anyone have a good snippet for temporarily locking files?, i.e so i can turn them on and off, i tried renaming the file but the server just deletes it.

[frymaster]

if you are running on a unix server you can make a system call to either chmod or chatter (via system() or similar) and turn off readability. it will mean that the "off" scripts will 404 when sought (or maybe return an uglier error... i haven't tried). You may run into permissions errors when calling chmod or chatter (ie, if your server runs under a different account than the one your scripts are chowned to).

Alternatley, you can write a script that fopens up the script you want to turn "off", reads it into a var, put "die;" or "header("Location: ")" at the top and then re-writes it to disk. Not a very pretty solution though.

[Anon]

Ok thanks guy I'll keep workin' on it. I was thinking of doing what you said, maybe write a script into the file and pass a varible to hide the areas of code I want to lock out.

[mattee]

Why not try some sort of permissions system like in phplib?

You should check out phpSecurePages too. Search for it on hotbot or something and it'll come up. Then you could still have a "pretty" page but the parts that aren't supposed to be shown can be blanked or some appropriate msg shown.

Regards,
Matt.

[kparker]

i tried renaming the file but the server just deletes it.

That's pretty alarming; but it shouldn't happen on any system I know of. What OS/Web server are you running, and what exactly did your code say?

[frymaster]

well, if you renamve foo to bar like so:

system("mv ./foo /dev/null/bar");

that should do it... 🙂

[kparker]

... but I doubt Paul was deliberately trying to shoot himself in the foot. :-)