Large file uploads with mySQL and file()

[juicy]

Hi,
The problem I have is that PHP doesn't inherently support a progress bar. While normally this is fine (uploading text files of 100k or less), I am providing users with the ability to upload large files. This large file size is in the order of 30Mb.

Now, getting over the familiar hurdles of setting all the timeouts and max filessizes in PHP, apache and mySQL is something I'm not interested in looking at, at the moment.

I'm simply after advice on how to read a file using standard I/O, putting that data into a database (Using datatype BLOB?) and each 'line' of the file (or reasonable increment) output the current progress.

Again, I'm not interested in the actual processing of the progress, just to know if this is feasable.

Thankyou in advance...

[Anon]

I think you would need to do this type of operation with a socket or FTP maybe. The problem is, when you load a file through an HTML form / PHP script, the file is typically put into a temporary directory below the document root. Once the file is fully loaded, you can use the copy() function to put it into the dir then use fopen() and fread() to put the binary data into the DB.

The approach I would take would be to invoke a shell script or another program to intermittantly check the filesize of the temp file as it is being loaded, then report back to the webserver to be sent ot the client. I don't know however if you can read a file size while it is being written. Of course this method would require some loose permissions that may not be a good idea.

If anyone else has any ideas on this, please let me know.