Question

I have the following file structure:

cron.php
/includes/functions.php
/classes/ClassName.php

corn.php includes functions.php calls new ClassName(). And functions.php contains the primitive autoloader:

 function __autoload($class_name) {
   require_once('classes/'.$class_name.'.php');
 }

which works fine when cron.php is called from browser. However if run from shell it is giving “No such file or directory” fatal error. I tried to wrap ‘classes/’.$class_name.’.php’ into realpath() function to no avail. Please advise.

Answer 1

You may use dirname(__FILE__) to get the “absolute” current directory of your autoloading PHP script.

You could do something like (supposing your autoloading script is in a subdirectory of your project):

function __autoload($class_name) {
  require_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/../classes/'.$class_name.'.php');
}

See:

• http://php.net/manual/en/language.constants.predefined.php
• http://fr.php.net/manual/en/function.dirname.php