@file problems w/ remote files

Hi, This is regarding the same problem that Jeff posted earlier (yes, the exast same problem - I'm working with him). He seems to have given some of you the wrong impression about the problem - he is not ignoring your posts, it's just that the posts aren't helping the problem ;) The problem is that the @ isn't suppressing the warnings properly. Our code is currently trying to pull the results of a script off a server - and if it can't, it uses the most current copy stored locally. The problem, is that while we are expecting the @ to suppress the warnings (and thereby letting us continue on to use file() on the local copy), it is instead allowing file to spit out a warning which kills the script. We are currently getting a errornum of 2, and it's spitting out fopen(<filename>) - Success which is exceedingly annoying. What would be perfect, is if someone knows of an alternate way to download a file from a server - if that failed, set a flag and continue processing rather than simply erroring out. Thanks for any help - sorry for the miscommunication earlier. Joseph