Random URL That Expires

[transfield]

Hello,
I want to hide a file somewhere on my server. I then want to create a random url that will eventually expire(after a few days) which links to this file. Then I want to give this url to my customers in order for them to download the file.

How do I do all this or can you point me to some tutorials in order for me to do this?

Thanks.

[MarkR]

I guess one way of doing this is creating a symbolic link to the directory which really contains the files.

Every day in a cron job,:

1. Create a new symlink to the directory with some hashed name from the date
2. Remove the one from the day before yesterday

Then you'd have two symlinks existing at any given time, today's and yesterday's. People won't be able to have permanent links to stuff inside your downloads directory because it will keep changing.

You also need to stop people accessing the files via the true downloads directory, but that can be done easily with Apache's configuration.

Mark

NB: The symlinks idea goes a bit wrong if you're not on Unix 🙂