Re: fopen('.', 'r') succeedes !?

Umberto Salsi wrote: > Discovered today: fopen() opens '.' and '..' but fread() returns nothing > without errors nor end-of-file, so this loop: > > $f = fopen('.', 'r'); > if( $f === FALSE ) die("fopen failed"); > $n = 0; > while(($s = fread($f, 10)) !== FALSE) > $n += strlen($s); > fclose($f); > echo "total bytes read: $n\n"; > > never ends! The same happens with '..'. Tested on PHP 5.6.3 and 7.0.0 > under Slackware 14.1 32-bits. Under Vista, instead, fopen() fails as > expected. > > Bug or specific feature under Linux? According to the manual[]1] that is a feature: | This function *may* also succeed when filename is a directory. If you | are unsure whether filename is a file or a directory, you may need to | use the is_dir() function before calling fopen(). (Emphasis mine.) [1] <http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php#refsect1-function.fopen-notes> [2] <http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php#55434> [3] <http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php#37761> There are some user contributed notes[2][3] on the manual page which clarify what's happening. I'm not sure why there's an infinite loop -- have you tried feof() instead of relying on the return value of fread(). -- Christoph M. Becker