note 69541 added to ref.session

I spent about 8 hours debugging a problem with sessions and redirecting, and I finally found the problem, which after looking back, should have been the first thing I tried. I use sessions to prevent hotlinking, so if someone hotlinks my file, I will redirect them to a different page by re-writing the header information. When I redirected, I sent path information in the GET data about the file they were trying to access. Long story short, when I redirected with a forward-slash "/" AFTER the .php, the page would create a different session ID than the rest of my domain was using. This happened despite the fact that the cookie path was set to "/" (which should have captured any path on my domain). The issue was even harder to figure out, because the page with the wrong session ID was NOT creating a second cookie. The only cookie was the one with the proper ID, but the broken page did not use this cookie (where then, did it get this ID from?). To fix the problem, I simply removed the forward-slash from the GET data (base64_encoding works nicely). I imagine this is an issue with my browser parsing the url, but I tried both Opera and Firefox (IE doesn't load anymore :/) and both browsers showed the same problem. I looked into hidden header data, failure to write the cookie, trans_ses_id (even though it was set to false), HTTP_HOST, everything, but in the end it was just a stupid forward-slash that had done me in. ---- Server IP: 216.194.113.175 Probable Submitter: 67.41.7.98 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/69541 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/69541/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/69541/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/69541/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/69541/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/69541/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/69541/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/69541 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/69541 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php