fopen, fputs, fwrite, fclose, fdammit

I'm trying to put a comment page on my weblog. I have the link displayed in the format of date first, then a link to bookmark the entry, and then a link to post a comment. I want to write the comments to a text file. My comment page accepts a default value of "target", which is set to the date to be commented on. Then it opens (or creates) a text file in the format of the variable set by $pctarget. $pctarget = "/blogbits/".substr($target,0,6)."/_".$target."_bc.txt"; if ($newpost == "yes") { $addrecord = $newpostname."\n".$newpostemail."\n".$newposturl."\n".date("l, F jS, Y")."\n".$newpostcomments."\n<br>"; $fullcomments .= "-----splitcomment-----\n"; $getcomments = fopen($pctarget, "a"); fputs($getcomments, $addrecord); fclose($getcomments); } I've tried assigning fputs() and fclose() to variables (which I infer is the right way to do things but the manual isn't clear on it, i.e. $gc=fputs($getcomments, $addrecord); but that doesn't work either. When the page loads I get a blank page and this for the source: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"></HEAD> <BODY></BODY></HTML> It's not even the header source I told it to put out. As I understand it, this is the source put out by an error page, when the code won't run. I haven't been able to figure out what simple thing I'm missing, and I know it's simple because it invariably is. (Law of Murphy, don't ya know.) Any suggestions? Would lack of file permissions cause this? Server is a Linux box. Thanks in advance