Question

I’m trying to create a bit of code to first check the content of a directory to see if a file exists and if it does, append a number to the filename. Unfortunately I can’t get it to work at the moment, the php produces no errors but a new file is not created if one already exists. Here is my code atm:

$Scan_Name_Output =  "dirbuster_" . $workload["Scan_Name"] . "_output.txt"; 
$Check_Output = exec("ls " . $Output_Directory . " | grep -w " . $Scan_Name_Output);
$j = 1;

while (!empty($Check_Output))
{
    $Scan_Name_Output = $Scan_Name_Output . $j;
    $j++;

If I replace the while loop with an if statement, it works – so it’s not the file paths or anything that are causing the problem. I’ve tried a fair few combinations but can’t get it to work.

I have tried using file_exists() but it doesn’t work – I think it’s because I’m passing it variables that have been put through escapeshellarg(). As a result I think file_exists literally looks for /path/to/dir/’Report1.txt’ – obviously ‘Report1.txt’ doesn’t exist, Report1.txt does. This is why I was using exec and ls.

Thanks for any responses

Answer 1

PHP has some nice functions built in to handle files. You should think about using file_exists() for example.

$basename =  "dirbuster_" . $workload["Scan_Name"] . "_output.txt";          
$Scan_Name_Output = $basename;
$j = 1;
while (file_exists($Scan_Name_Output)){
    $Scan_Name_Output = $basename . $j;
    $j++;
}
$ourFileHandle = fopen($Scan_Name_Output, 'w') or die("can't open file");