Problem: file_exists absolute path

[dchaffin]

I'm having a problem using file_exists with an absolute path and I can
not figure out why.

I tried the exact example that is on www.php.net ...

<?php
$filename = '/path/to/foo.txt';

if (file_exists($f ilename)) {
echo "The file $filename exists";
} else {
echo "The file $filename does not exist";
}
?>

.... and it does not work.
Here it is ...
http://216.12.100.243/test.php

You can see phpinfo() on that server here ...
http://216.12.100.243/phpinfo.php

If I change the first line to ...
$filename = 'path/to/foo.txt';
....it works fine, but I really would like to use an absolute path.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Daniel Tryba]

dchaffin <dc******@dream cc.com> wrote:

If I change the first line to ...
$filename = 'path/to/foo.txt';
...it works fine, but I really would like to use an absolute path.

I'm under the impression that you want the path to be an absolute path
in the URL! That is not the same as an absolute path in the filesystem,
unless the document_root is the root of the filesystem. Try prepending
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] to convert the absolute url path to an
absolute filesystem path.

[dchaffin]

Thanks for your response.

Hmm ... ok. So that fixed the test file (test.php) ... however, the
actual location I'm trying to use this is in a virtual directory in IIS
and $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] always goes to c:\\inetpub\\ww wroot. I'm
still looking through the server vars to try and find one that
references the virtual dir ... any suggestions?

[dchaffin]

....or is there somthing other than file_exists (or other filesystem
functions like fopen or is_readable) that maybe uses the url based
paths instead of filesystem based ones?

[Chung Leong]

"dchaffin" <dc******@dream cc.com> wrote in message
news:11******** **************@ z14g2000cwz.goo glegroups.com.. .

Thanks for your response.

Hmm ... ok. So that fixed the test file (test.php) ... however, the
actual location I'm trying to use this is in a virtual directory in IIS
and $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] always goes to c:\\inetpub\\ww wroot. I'm
still looking through the server vars to try and find one that
references the virtual dir ... any suggestions?

dirname(__FILE_ _) should do the trick.