Question

I’ve been reading that people face problems when using the exit function in their php script while running fastCGI

https://serverfault.com/questions/84962/php-via-fastcgi-terminated-by-calling-exit

http://php.net/manual/en/function.exit.php

“It should be noted that if building a site that runs on FastCGI, calling exit will generate an error in the server’s log file. This can quickly fill up.”

However my error log isn’t reporting this problem after running this simple script even though I have fastCGI configured:

<?php
$num=2;

if($num==2){
    exit();
}
?>

Would it be safe to use the exit function while I have fastCGI configured? And are there any alternatives to the exit function in php?

EDIT: I’m using the exit() function form form validation (ie if a form is valid exit, if not parse all the posted variables into the text fields.)

Answer 1

There are a few legitimate reasons to use exit() which is the same as die(). One example would be to follow a header Location: redirect.

Form validation is not the place to use die(). Structure your code so that you utilize functions or classes with methods that return values instead, and utilize branching logic.

In terms of fastcgi, if exit is used appropriately for situations where code is reached that should not be, then those situations will be atypical and a few log messages should not be a problem. Having a log file fill up seems a pretty silly reason not to do something — an active webserver is logging every request and nobody argues that you shouldn’t have a web log.