With Apache/PHP5, is it possible to get the contents of an uploaded file directly without having it written to the file system?
Not much on Google about this, but it appears that files are always written to a temporary directory once they are uploaded.
Not sure i understand you, but i will try to answer.
http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/php_file_upload.asp
What you can learn here is that every file is uploaded to php’s temp directory. Then it is up to your script to move/copy that file to some permanent web accessible directory, because file that was uploaded to php’s temp dir is deleted after the script end executing.