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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T14:16:13+00:00

How do I get something more meaningful than ‘FALSE’ when I can’t open a

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How do I get something more meaningful than ‘FALSE’ when I can’t open a file. 

$myFile = "/home/user/testFile.txt"; 
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");

When I use the die statement, can't open file is returned to the client, and it is almost useless. If I remove it, no error is raised. If I return $fh it is FALSE. I tried both local file name and absolute file name. My index.html file is in one of the sub folders of my hole folder. Furthermore, I am using suPHP with the folder I am trying to write to having a permission of 0755 (suPHP requires this for all folders).

How do I figure out why there was a problem, or at least query it before trying to open the file.

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  1. Editorial Team

    fopen should raise an E_WARNING if it fails. See error_get_last or set_error_handler(*) to catch it. Other than that you can use file_exists and is_readable to check whether the file is missing or there’s another (probably permission-related) problem.

    (*) I consider it good practice to always set an error handler that turns all PHP errors into exceptions.

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