Re: [PHP] Very Large File Splatter

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 4:04 PM, Brian Smither <[email protected]> wrote:
> PHP 5.4.4-TS-VC9 on Windows XP SP3 NTFS non-system drive with 18GB free.
>
> I dare not try to replicate this. As such, I cannot firmly place the blame on PHP.
>
> I have peppered a PHP application with a call to a function which appends-only to a logfile the parameters passed to it. Each pass of the application creates many MB of content.
>
> It is conceivable that I ran out of hard drive space.
>
> When that which what I was working on seemed to be acting very weird, I rebooted the computer only to see thousands of lines scroll by from Windows repairing the file system.
>
> I discovered logfile contents in many dozens of files. The timestamp and filesize of the damaged files were not changed. Only the contents replaced with slices of the logfile.
>
> Again, I'm not going to try to 'intentionally' replicate this, so I ask:
>
> Has PHP's interface with the NTFS file sub-system ever been reported to splatter a file across the contents of a drive?

    Not to my knowledge.  It actually sounds to me like a code issue.
Are you using file_put_contents() with the parameters in reverse
order, by chance?

    If you can show the write portion of the code in your iteration,
as well as a sample of the naming convention, it may offer more clues.
 In any case, either disk space or inode exhaustion is likely the
reason things borked-up for you.

-- 
</Daniel P. Brown>
Network Infrastructure Manager
http://www.php.net/