File Processing

Anon

Hi all,

Hope you can give me some ideas as how to makje it work:

I have a site that users can upload files to some directories:
Example: /upload_dir/jdoe.
Users can upload to jdoe, sometime mutiple files.
I.e. /upload/dir/jdoe/file1... file2 etc.

The upload part is working fine. At a certain time a script will be run to make a tar file out of all the user uploaded files. Then the original files will be removed. The script was run only ONCE a day. There's no problem there. But now, I have to run the script, may be two, three or four times a day. That runs into a porblem. I certainly do not want the script to run WHEN USERS ARE UPLOADING FILES. I was thnking to use the filesize function to check for file size, i.e. at the beginning of the script, then again right before the tar operation. Is there a better and safer way? Some sample code will be much apprecaited.

Thanks

factory21

Easiest way to would be a file locking mechanism (e.g., flock). Just create a file and lock it whenever an upload operation is being performed. And before running your script, check the lock and wait until the lock is free before running.

There's some issues that you need to be aware of. This basically boils down to a multi-threading/shared-resource type of problem.

Anon

Thank you for the response. It's much appreciated. However, I can't use flock. (I did not mention that the upload part is through mapped drives, it's an intranet, sorry.)

Here is the layout:

(1) users upload file(s) to server, example: /upload/jdoe/file1, file2,etc

(2) A php script is fired, go into the directories, grep the file name(s), tar the file and give the tar file a new name, remove the original, move the tar file to a new directory, write file info to mysql, then display a page with the newly tar file. From there, other users can download the tar file. The site is purely PHP and mysql EXCEPT the upload part.

Again, thank you for the pointer.

D.J.