Back tick ` in PHP is used to read the output from another program, usually external commands in Linux shell, much like the way a pipe does the job with bash. In PHP, Backtick “ embraced string is treated a command and executed externally in shell, returning the execution results from the standard output. For …
Of course, you will have to read in the file first, preferably in an array. To read a file in an array, you just need the file() function: $lines = file(‘quotes.txt’); Then, you shuffle the array with shuffle() function that randomizes all the items in the array thus shuffling the lines in the file quotes.txt: …
PHP: Randomizing All Lines of a File – Shuffle Lines in a Text File Read More »
As we know, lines are separated from each other by line breaks indicated by “\n” in PHP, therefore, one method would be to explode() the entire file content string by “\n” into an array and then count() the number of the array items to come to the number of lines of that file. However, there’s …
PHP: Count Lines of a File and Get the Number of Lines in a Text File Read More »
Aside from the common approach in reading a file with php fopen() function which is a little annoying in that it requires extra steps before actually reading the contents of the file. PHP has other file reading functions to enable you instantly get what you want and read the contents of the file without the …
PHP: Reading a File into a String or Reading the File into an Array Read More »
By remote file, I mean files from another website or web server identified by a remote URL. Usually, you can open such a file via the normal procedures you would take to open a local file with php file functions such as fopen() or file_get_contents(). However, to make this work, you will first make sure …
So you need a temporary file to hold some middle data. There are 2 functions in PHP you can use for creating temporary files: PHP function tmpfile() creates a temporary file, opens it and returns the file handler: $temp_fh = tmpfile(); f write($temp_fh, "The current time is ".strftime(‘%c’)); // the file automatically goes away when …
PHP can only copy, rename or move files that are of the same owner with who is running the PHP script. After making sure of this, you can proceed to: Copy a file to another place in PHP: $old = ‘/tmp/yesterday.txt’; $new = ‘/tmp/today.txt’; copy($old, $new) or die(“Unable to copy $old to $new.”); Rename a …
The function in PHP that’s used to create a directory is just the same with that in Linux bash shell: mkdir. First make sure the current working directory is where you want the new directory to be, then run this line of PHP: mkdir(‘new_dir’); // creates a new directory named new_dir under the current directory
Every PHP script process has its own current working directory, files and directory are created under this directory by default if not otherwise specified. The default working directory of any php script is the home directory of the php owner or the current working directory returned by Linux shell command pwd. As most of the …
As long as the owner of the php script has the necessary privilege to delete a file, the php script has the ability to delete it. To delete a file with PHP, use the unlink() function: unlink(‘tmpfile.txt’) or die(‘Unable to delete the file’); It returns true if the deletion is successful and false otherwise.
It’s common tasks to parse and deal with file paths or URL in PHP. And most common must be to identify and distinguish the directory path or file name from the file path or URL. For instance, the full path to a text file is: ‘/home/john/lanning.com/somefile.txt‘ and you want get the directory part as well …
PHP: Getting Directory Path and Filename from A Full Path or URL Read More »
There are 2 ways to the size of a file with PHP. PHP function filesize() returning the file size in bytes: $bytes = filesize(‘log.txt’); // $bytes now contains the size of the file log.txt in bytes PHP function stat() returning an array of information about the file including the size of it, also in bytes: …
Unless you have explicitly opted out with a noatime option mounting your Linux file system, there are generally 3 types of time on each and every file of Linux: atime or access time, ctime or change time, and mtime or modification time. These are the differences between the 3 file system times: atime — access …
File atime is the last accessed time of the file, in PHP, you can get the last accessed time of any file by: $last = fileatime(‘anyfile’); You may also want to know how to get the mtime or ctime of a file.
File mtime is the last modified time of the file or the time when the last modification of the file content occurred. To get the last modified time of the file in PHP, use: $last = filemtime(‘anyfile’); Read more about how to get the ctime and atime in PHP.
File ctime may be a little misleading in nature as many would think it as the creation time of the file, but actually it’s the meta data such as the ownership or permissions change time of the file in addition to content modification. To get the ctime of a file in PHP: $last = filectime(‘anyfile’); …
PHP: Getting Last Changed Time of a File – File ctime Read More »
It’s weird that I encountered this problem that when you post new posts in WordPress, there’s a possibility that it may run into a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error without publishing the article at all. I did some split tests and in this post, the string ‘fopen‘ which is a php function seems to be …
As I said how to parse php program command line arguments in the previous post, reading from user keyboard or console is also a considerable part of making interactive command line programs. How to let user type in something and make the php script read from the keyboard so that it can identify the user …
PHP: Read from Keyboard – Get User Input from Keyboard Console by Typing Read More »
PHP is a lot more than just HTML rendering and outputting. It can also be run from shell command line like any legacy command line programs or tools we had in DOS and Linux shell. One of the major problem is to deal with arguments passed to such program and how to identify them inside …
Dealing with PHP command line programs / scripts run on shell and the arguments Read More »
Recommended to me by many fellows at cnsw.org, I’ve always been a fan of pair.com when I started in early 2006 into the world of online venture. They rarely advertise online (or maybe I just don’t know), and are hardly heard of by many hosting customers even after they have done plenty of research of …
Hosting Differences between Pair.com and PairLite.com Read More »
