Php create temporary file for download

What exactly though to achieve what I want I'm not sure. I only want the file to be available once, but I assume it has to be stored somewhere initally for the user to download which will then need cleaing up after manually? Check out this SO question's accepted solution.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Create a text file for download on-the-fly Ask Question. Asked 11 years ago. Active 2 years, 8 months ago. Viewed k times. Submit a Pull Request Report a Bug.

Description tmpfile : resource false. Caution If the script terminates unexpectedly, the temporary file may not be deleted. How can it be downloaded if you output nothing? Creating the file on disk and sending the file to the client are two completely different things. You're creating a file and then sending the client nothing. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. I would never post an answer that I didn't test myself first. It works perfectly fine : — icecub.

And make sure your editor doesn't save the code with a BOM — icecub. If I download one file from their site they give a direct link to click it right? How should I know that the link was expired? If I copy the same link on my download manager after one day, it can't download the same file. What if they post the link into any other site like forum website, blog, etc.

This is the problem I want to prevent to protect my file. I am doing this on PHP but I can't figure it out When you make this link for someone, store the random string in a database table. This table might look like:. If the created timestamp is too old, don't do so. The solution that comes to my mind is as follows: If you have table which represent file and for example FileModel you can save there name of the file, some details, size, also path to the file in your file system and unique, which can be result of md5 from some of data you choose for it based on some file details for example :.

Each time before letting someone download your file you check if there is such unique value in your table if so you let someone download it with ur downloadFile method created in FileModel, but just before that you make new unique to prevent from any more downloads.

The file created using tmpfile function gets automatically deleted when close using fclose or when there are no remaining references to the file handle. The end of the script also results in the removal of the temporary file created using tmpfile function. The tmpfile function takes no parameters and it returns a file handle which is similar to the one returned by fopen , for the new file or FALSE on failure.

Errors And Exception: The temporary file is automatically removed when it is closed with fclose , or when the script ends. The tmpfile function returns Boolean False but many times it happens that it returns a non-Boolean value which evaluates to False. Below programs illustrate the tmpfile function.