Problems with fwrite and fclose?

WebmasterJoe

When I try running the script below, I get each of these two errors once for every row in my database. Can you please help me figure out what's wrong with my code? Thanks.

Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/couponi/public_html/users/template.php on line 20

Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/couponi/public_html/users/template.php on line 21

<?php

$db = mysql_connect ("localhost", "database", "password");

mysql_select_db("databasename",$db);
$result = mysql_query("SELECT *
FROM `users`", $db);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {

$username= $row[username];

ob_start(); 
passthru("/home/files/public_html/users/  -source http://www.mysite.com/template.php?user=$username"); 
$html = ob_get_contents(); 
ob_end_clean(); 
// write output to file       

$fp = fopen("$file", "w"); 
fwrite($fp, $html); 
fclose($fp); 
}


?>

tsinka

Hi,

what's the filename $file. Most likely the file couldn't be opened/created for writing.

There might be something missing in your passthrough call, maybe wget ?

WebmasterJoe

Woops, I forgot to define $file - thanks for that. Now I'm not getting any errors, and the files are being created, but they still don't contain content from the template. Any idea why?

tsinka

What do you want to execute with your passthrough call ? I can't see an application you're executing

WebmasterJoe

Sounds like the passthrough call is my problem.

I don't really understand how passthrough calls work yet. Can you tell me what I need to add for this to work?

WebmasterJoe

bump!

WebmasterJoe

tsinka

Hi,

what did you want to do with passthrough ? passthrough and some other functions allow you to execute apps and commands on the shell of your server.

Can you tell me what your original intention was to use passthrough ?

WebmasterJoe

The script needs to pull a file from the url that's within the passthrough call.

I based the script on a comment in the PHP manual which appears to do what I need. I don't entirely understand how passthrough calls work, or why I need to be using it at all, but maybe you can get an idea from the second comment down the page at:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-start.php

Thanks for helping me out with this. I've bought a new php book and tried everything I know to do, but still can't figure it out.

tsinka

Ok,

look where lynx is and replace
/home/files/public_html/users/ in your passthrough call with the path to lynx.

The problem is that you might run into an endless loop because you're getting the contents of template.php from within template.php.

Place the code to get the contents of a page in a seperate script like getpage.php Otherwise lynx would call template.php which again would get the content of template.php and so on.

If template.php and http://www.mysite.com/template.php are different scripts all should work fine, just make sure that you prevent endless loops

tsinka

A word about passthrough and the other stuff 🙂

passthrough executes the given command and just prints the output of that command. If you wouldn't use the ob functions the content would be displayed in the browser windows. The ob functions enable output buffering. ob_start starts output buffering. The output is then printed to an internal php buffer and not to the client. ob_get_contents then fetches the content of that buffer. ob_end_clean stops the output buffering and cleans the buffer to prevent that the content will be sent to the browser.

btw ... where do you set the name of the output file ($file) ?

WebmasterJoe

hmmmmm... The passthrough call is STILL not working. 🙁

I've fixed the path to lynx so I know it's correct, and I've tried running just the passthrough call without buffering it, and still, nothing comes up!

Is there anything else I can try? I have no idea why this isnt working!

tsinka

Hi,

if you remove the lines

ob_start();
$html = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

the output will be sent to the browser. You can then see what lynx gets.

If the browser seems to load the page forever without displaying something or without stopping to display something then the problem might be that you're in an endless loop. If the page you get with lynx is the template.php above then you would most like run into an endless loop because the script will permanently get itself because every call of the script would start the while loop from the beginning.

WebmasterJoe

Yeah I've already tried removing those lines to directly display the passthrough call's output, and I get nothing.

I don't think that looping is the problem, because I'm using this script to call a different page (template.php) that's not related to the script.

The only thing I can think of is maybe I'm giving the wrong URL of the file that's being called. Right now I'm using http://www.mysite.com/template.php. Should I change it to something like template.php or /public_html/template.php?

Thanks

tsinka

Do you get something if you call http://www.mysite.com/template.php?... directly from within a browser ?

But I think you tried that already 🙂

WebmasterJoe

yeah that was like the first thing I checked 😉

WebmasterJoe

If I run a very basic script like the one below, shouldn't it display the output to the browser? I tried runnning this and I dont get any output at all.

<?php
passthru("/user/bin/lynx -source http://www.mysite.com/template.php"); 
?>

tsinka

Hi,

I tested it again it works fine for me. To see if there is an error you can change the passthru call to e.g.

passthru("/usr/bin/lynx -source url 2>&1")

2>&1 will redirect stderr output to stdout and you'll see an error message in your browser if there is one 🙂

WebmasterJoe

<?php
passthru("/usr/bin/lynx -source url 2>&1");
?>

Gave me this error:
/root/: No such directory

tsinka

Hi,

does

passthru("/usr/bin/lynx --help 2>&1");

give you the same error ?