(cached include?) causing error

cliffyman

I have an application I'm working on that has different dirs several levels deep, each of them containing a file called var_local.php, which I use to init / set variables. Each var_local.php does a simple include("../var_local.php") at the beginning to grab its parent include file, which allows for each page to "inherit" variables from its parent directory.

It seems that when I have several of these in succession, that the PHP totally dies - I don't even get an error message, the request just seems to time out and I get the usual "unable to connect" type error in my browser.

Can anyone offer some advice? I read somewhere that PHP caches its includes by default, and I wasn't sure if it was getting confused by caching the first var_local.php and then running some kind of infinite loop by always looking for a ../var_local.php. There has to be a way around this... I had tried wrapping each include of var_local.php in a clearstatcache() call but that didn't seem to fix the problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated - thanks!

-Cliff

cliffyman

It appears that this particular behavior is actually causing PHP to crash. Here is an excerpt from my Apache (1.3.27) error_log:

[Tue Jan 28 14:20:45 2003] [notice] child pid 23420 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:19:14 2003] [notice] child pid 23423 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:18:45 2003] [notice] child pid 16496 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:18:44 2003] [notice] child pid 11771 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:17:34 2003] [notice] child pid 11490 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:17:01 2003] [notice] child pid 11711 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:16:57 2003] [notice] child pid 11450 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:16:55 2003] [notice] child pid 11710 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:16:54 2003] [notice] child pid 16504 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
[Tue Jan 28 14:16:52 2003] [notice] child pid 23496 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

Does anyone have idea what's going on here? Could there be some kind of error during compilation? It only seems to happen when there are a number of successive includes...?

-Cliff

cliffyman

It looks like I figured out what the problem is - I was inadvertantly creating an infinite loop with my includes. I wasn't aware that all includes with relative paths are processed according to the BASE file, and not relative to the file that the include is actually invoked in.

My question is, then - how to get around this? How can I include a simple chain of files to each other in the manner described earlier? I come from a ColdFusion background and they includes are all relative to the file that invokes the include, which makes more sense to me.

-Cliff