note 13099 deleted from function.parse-url by jimw

Files which are opened with fopen() get automatically closed when their last reference is lost. So you don't need to store the file pointer into a variable if you just need to check that the file can be opened. For example, the following code does not leak:   if (fopen($filename, 'a')) {     // OK file exists and can be appended   } else {     // File may exist, but it cannot be modified   } And you don't need to close a file on return of a function which assigned the file pointer to a variable which was not declared as global in the function:   function log_to($filename,$line){     $er=error_reporting(0);//avoid PHP warning if file can't be open     if (($fp = fopen($filename, 'a'))       fputs($line, $fp);     error_reporting($er);   } When assigning the file pointer to a global variable, the file is closed when the global variable scope ends, i.e. when the script terminates.