Re: Short circuit evaluation and include

include and require are not functions. They are language constructs. They probably don't "return values" nor short-circuit in the usual way. Ditto for "echo" If you can strip the parens and have it still work, it's for sure not a function. <?php include_once $file; echo $file; ?> is perfectly valid code. PS All those disk calls are going to get pretty expensive if your site gets heavy traffic... You may want to just write a custom error_handler and use include_once which will let you trap the error and do something intelligent with it...