accessing files not in www root directory.

Hi, I am trying to write a page that will perform a select on a DB and get the path and file name of an image. Then display the image. The DB part if fine but I am having difficulty figuring out how to get the images to display. For example: result from select: $file_path = "/home/pics/friends/" $file_name = "bob.jpg" Now, say my web root directory is "/etc/http/wwwroot" How do I create a link to my file "/home/pics/friends/bob.jpg"? I tried symlink() but the link created appears to hang around after it is no longer needed. By the way, this is a Linux server running Apache. Any ideas? Thanks, Sterling Anderson sterling@sterlinganderson.net