PHP: clearstatcache

Description

void clearstatcache ( void )

When you use stat(), lstat(), or any of the other functions listed in the affected functions list (below), PHP caches the information those functions return in order to provide faster performance. However, in certain cases, you may want to clear the cached information. For instance, if the same file is being checked multiple times within a single script, and that file is in danger of being removed or changed during that script's operation, you may elect to clear the status cache. In these cases, you can use the clearstatcache() function to clear the information that PHP caches about a file.

You should also note that PHP doesn't cache information about non-existent files. So, if you call file_exists() on a file that doesn't exist, it will return FALSE until you create the file. If you create the file, it will return TRUE even if you then delete the file.

Note: This function caches information about specific filenames, so you only need to call clearstatcache() if you are performing multiple operations on the same filename and require the information about that particular file to not be cached.

Affected functions include stat(), lstat(), file_exists(), is_writable(), is_readable(), is_executable(), is_file(), is_dir(), is_link(), filectime(), fileatime(), filemtime(), fileinode(), filegroup(), fileowner(), filesize(), filetype(), and fileperms().

User Contributed Notes
clearstatcache

Adi Feldman (Adi at Rogers dot com)
09-Feb-2005 08:02


This function also applies under circumstances where fsockopen() is used.  I tried to make a small loop that retries to connect a certain number of times before giving up, and it simply skipped over the retry connections and passed them as failures.  Adding clearstatcache() between each retry did the trick.



This will NOT retry connecting after the first failure:

do {

$connection=fsockopen("some_host_or_ip");

} while (!$connection);



This will retry connecting after each failure:

do {

$connection=fsockopen("somewebsite");

clearstatcache();

} while (!$connection);

search for in the