file access problem

[Colm Osiris]

I'm going through the example in the book 'PHP & MySQL Web Development' by Luke Welling & Laura Thomson, and I've hit a problem in chapter 2!

It's to do with accessing files, which is as yet something I know very little about.

The code that was supplied with the book says this:

PHP: Select all

// open file for appending 


 @ $fp = fopen("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/../orders/orders.txt", 'ab'); 
flock($fp, LOCK_EX);  

if (!$fp) 
{ 
    echo '<p><strong> Your order could not be processed at this time. ' 
    .'Please try again later.</strong></p></body></html>'; 
    exit; 
}  

fwrite($fp, $outputstring, strlen($outputstring)); 
flock($fp, LOCK_UN);  
fclose($fp); 

echo '<p>Order written.</p>'; 

The error I get says this:

Warning: flock(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /******/******/public_html/book/autoparts/02/processorder.php on line 67

Line 67 is the first flock.

I appreciate this is really a UNIX problem, but at this point I just want something to make this code work, so I can carry on learning about PHP and MySQL, rather than a detailed tangent about UNIX, which I intend to learn about later as a separate project.

Can anybody help, please?

I am running this on a remote server, not my own machine. The PHP and HTML files are all in ~/public_html/book/autoparts/02/.

[sypher]

Makesure you have CHMOD the directory its talking about.

(Open ur ftp locate the directory right click CHMOD)
It may be slightly different with assorted FTP programs.

[grahame]

Yes, it's likely to be file permissions. The fopen is probably failing, but the @ character at the start of that line tells PHP to supress the error message if it has a problem. If you remove the @ for a test run, you'll see the real error and not the aftereffect with is the error reported by flock.

-- Graham