Question

I am facing a curious situation. I am using CakePHP 2.0 (locally), XAMPP and I wanted to add a simple hit counter in my homepage so I added the following code (very very simple)

<?php
$filename = 'hitcount.txt';
$handle = fopen($filename, 'r');
$hits = trim(fgets($handle)) + 1;
fclose($handle);

$handle = fopen($filename, 'w');
fwrite($handle, $hits);
fclose($handle);

echo $hits;

There is a text file named hitcount.txt which contains the number of hits (everytime I visit the page it should increase the number of hits). It works. The problem appeared when I tried to access the hitcount.txt file. It was empty but the echo of $hits returned the exact result! I deleted the file and it still shows me the expected result! I used a different browser, the same. I deleted CakePHP’s cache, no change. I used the same piece of code in another page and it did not complain with some error, returning the expected result.

How is it possible for Cakephp to “see” a file that does not exist? Has it anything to do with Apache?

Answer 1

You probably view the file at the wrong location as CakePHP’s. My guess is CakePHP’s referring to the file at app/webroot/hitcount.txt.

You might want to define a full path for hitcount.txt so you can be sure that you and CakePHP are both referring to the same location.

<?php
$filename = TMP.'hitcount.txt';

This would locate the file at `app/tmp/hitcount.txt’.