unlink rmdir strangeness

redearth406

Im pulling my hair out over somthing that I though would just take a moment.

I am just trying to delete a non-empty folder by unix commands through php or though running through with an array and deleteing the files than the dir.

now I cannot get any of it to work.

my biggest stump is somthing as simple as this..

$path = "AnalysisData/test.html";
$path2 = "AnalysisData/testDir/test.html";
unlink($path)
	or die("Couldn't DELETE path FILE");
unlink($path2)
	or die("Couldn't DELETE path2 FILE");

I get an error message for path2 "Couldn't DELETE path2 FILE"
but path one gets deleted fine!!!!
This is a simple peice of code. I dont get it at all.

Please help,
Thanks,
Nathan

swr

Presumably testDir is not writable by the web server.

Whenever some kind of file operation fails, OS-level file permissions are the first thing to check.

redearth406

thanks, that is kind of what I figured.
If I set the AnalysisData dir to 777 the unlinks work.
But I dont see how they got set BACK to something else (0644?)
Does ws_ftp reset permissions on program close?
Im on godaddy.com servers I wonder if they reset permissions under some trigger.

Stranger things have been happening.
this used to work..

$this->cmd = "rm -rf $this->deldir";
`$this->cmd`;

AnalysisData/bowman_88_double_flip = $this->deldir
the "bowman" is the one I used to delete.
Now I get no errors, I have AnalysisData dir set to 777 and I can delete any files right under AnalysisData but NOT under bowman_88_double_flip or the dir itself.

crazyness

redearth406

Ive heard and seen some examples of Perl being able to successfully use chmod where php has a rough time (I tried dozens of combos in php). Is this true and would it be worth the time diving into perl for this purpose?
Thanks again,
Nathan

swr

If it's a filesystem permission thing, then Perl isn't going to help you. Everything is subject to the operating system's security contraints.

If safe-mode restrictions are in effect on your PHP install, then that may cause some file operations to fail under certain conditions. In that case, using perl would get around it. So would calling the "rm" binary with exec() or system(). If safe mode is properly set up, you probably won't be able to do any of these things though.