>PHP: rename - Manual

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rename

PHP at Drarok dot com
08-Aug-2006 01:57


As described from the unlink() page:

You have to release any handles to the file before you can rename it (True on Windows, at least).

This will NOT work, you'll receive permission denied errors:

<?php

    $fileHand = fopen('tempFile.txt', 'r');

    rename( 'tempFile.txt', 'tempFile2.txt' ); // Permission Denied!

?>



Simply close the handle to fix this:

<?php

    $fileHand = fopen('tempFile.txt', 'r');

    fclose($fileHand);

    rename( 'tempFile.txt', 'tempFile2.txt' );

?>



This has me scratching my head for some time, as the handle was opened at the top of a marge function, and the rename was at the bottom.

kitty_zoso at NOSPAMyahoo dot com
01-Feb-2006 11:45


Beware of rename if you're interested in preserving the case of filenames.  I'm writing a backup application using the command line version of php 5 on Windows XP and wanted to detect when the case of a source dir entry changed so I could rename it on the backup drive.



For instance, \common\kathy has been renamed to \common\Kathy on the source drive, so I wanted to rename the target directory, so a restore operation will have the new name to use.  The rename function didn't return false, but didn't change the case of the entry!  As a workaround (ugh) I change it to "something else" then do the final rename: instead of



rename('kathy','Kathy');



I use



rename('kathy', '~kathy~');

rename('~kathy~', 'Kathy');

bobbfwed at comcast dot net
26-Jan-2006 12:30


I have programmed a really nice program that remotely lets you manage files as if you have direct access to them (http://sourceforge.net/projects/filemanage/). I have a bunch of really handy functions to do just about anything to files or directories. In it I just finished redevloping the directory move function to utilize PHP's rename() since it is way more efficient than a copy/delete process. It goes through (recursivly) and renames all the files to a new location instead of copying them. It recreates the directory structure in the new location. It also allows you to overwrite the existing files, or not.

Here is the function I made; it will likely need tweaking to work as a standalone script, since it relies of variables set by my program (eg: loc1 -- which dynamically changes in my program):



<?PHP

  // loc1 is the path on the computer to the base directory that may be moved

define('loc1', 'C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache/htdocs', true);



  // move a directory and all subdirectories and files (recursive)

  // void dirmv( str 'source directory', str 'destination directory' [, bool 'overwrite existing files' [, str 'location within the directory (for recurse)']] )

function dirmv($source, $dest, $overwrite = false, $funcloc = NULL){



  if(is_null($funcloc)){

    $dest .= '/' . strrev(substr(strrev($source), 0, strpos(strrev($source), '/')));

    $funcloc = '/';

  }



  if(!is_dir(loc1 . $dest . $funcloc))

    mkdir(loc1 . $dest . $funcloc); // make subdirectory before subdirectory is copied



  if($handle = opendir(loc1 . $source . $funcloc)){ // if the folder exploration is sucsessful, continue

    while(false !== ($file = readdir($handle))){ // as long as storing the next file to $file is successful, continue

      if($file != '.' && $file != '..'){

        $path  = $source . $funcloc . $file;

        $path2 = $dest . $funcloc . $file;



        if(is_file(loc1 . $path)){

          if(!is_file(loc1 . $path2)){

            if(!@rename(loc1 . $path, loc1 . $path2)){

              echo '<font color="red">File ('.$path.') could not be moved, likely a permissions problem.</font>';

            }

          } elseif($overwrite){

            if(!@unlink(loc1 . $path2)){

              echo 'Unable to overwrite file ("'.$path2.'"), likely to be a permissions problem.';

            } else

              if(!@rename(loc1 . $path, loc1 . $path2)){

                echo '<font color="red">File ('.$path.') could not be moved while overwritting, likely a permissions problem.</font>';

              }

          }

        } elseif(is_dir(loc1 . $path)){

          dirmv($source, $dest, $overwrite, $funcloc . $file . '/'); //recurse!

          rmdir(loc1 . $path);

        }

      }

    }

    closedir($handle);

  }

} // end of dirmv()

?>



This new function will be in 0.9.7 (the next release of File Manage) which should release sometime early February.

Hope this helps some people.

php at froghh dot de
19-Jan-2006 03:00


Remark for "php at stock-consulting dot com"'s note:

This depends on the operating system.

On windows-systems you can't rename a file to an existing destination (ok, with tools you can - but they unlink the exisiting one before).

php at stock-consulting dot com
04-Jan-2006 02:36


rename() fails with PHP4 and PHP5 under Windows if the destination file exists, regardless of file permission settings. I now use a function similar to that of ddoyle [at] canadalawbook [dot] ca, which first tries rename(), checks if it returned FALSE and then uses copy()/unlink() if it failed.



However, copy() is, unlike rename(), NOT useable for "atomic updates". Another process may actually access the destination file while copy() is working. In such a case, the other process with perceive the file as empty or with incomplete content ("half written").

php-public at macfreek dot nl
18-Dec-2005 11:33


It is unclear what encoding the arguments of rename should have; For PHP 4.3, on a HFS+ filesystems, rename() did not handle UTF-8 strings, and returned an error.

jmalinsky at gmail dot com
09-Dec-2005 01:41


On WinXP/PHP 5+, not only does rename()  not follow the *nix rename as noted below, but other things (do not) happen.  If you're trying to rename a directory, files within the directory will NOT be present in the renamed directory, though sub-directories WILL be present.  Ultra-strange.  And as noted, your 'old' directory will remain on the server totally intact, which can be very confusing.



To try and rename a folder on XP via PHP, I wound up using a workaround: first i used the copydirr() function posted by makarenkoa at ukrpost dot net on the "copy" page of the online manual to copy all folders and files within the original directory to the new one... and then to delete the original directory (and all files/folders beneath it), i used the delDir() function corrected by czambran at gmail dot com on the "rmdir" page of the online manual.  Why didn't I use unlink()?  Because, unlink does NOT work on Windows systems either (and even if it did work, its not recursive without extra coding).



So, all in all, rename() is pretty much a useless function if you are intending to rename a folder on an XP box.

tbrillon at gmail dot com
14-Sep-2005 01:27


I needed to move a file to another folder regardless if that file existed in the target already so I wrote a small piece to append a unique number to each file.



$rem = $_GET['file'];

$ticket = uniqid(rand(), true);



rename("$rem", "www/home/storefile/$ticket$rem");



the output looks like this - 6881432893ad4925a1.70147481filename.txt



This also helps if you want different versions of the file stored.

ddoyle [at] canadalawbook [dot] ca
07-Sep-2005 03:35


rename() definitely does not follow the *nix rename convention on WinXP with PHP 5.  If the $newname exists, it will return FALSE and $oldname and $newname will remain in their original state.  You can do something like this instead:



function rename_win($oldfile,$newfile) {

   if (!rename($oldfile,$newfile)) {

      if (copy ($oldfile,$newfile)) {

         unlink($oldfile);

         return TRUE;

      }

      return FALSE;

   }

   return TRUE;

}

tomfelker at gmail dot com
11-Aug-2005 02:51


Actually, I'm pretty sure that rename follows the convention of *nix rename(2) in overwriting the destination if it exists atomically (meaning that no other process will see the destination cease to exist, even for an instant).  This is useful because it allows you to build a file as a temp file, then rename it to where you want it to be, and nobody sees the file when it's half done.



Probably rename($old, $new) with an existing new was caused by permission problems.  I bet the other problems you had were the result of not calling clearstatcache(), which can cause PHP to act like a file exists though it has since been deleted.

JRog
27-May-2005 11:44


To anyone wondering, rename($old, $new) returns FALSE if $new already exists.  My script called for overwriting the file if it existed so I did this:



if(file_exists($new)) { unlink($new); }

$ok = rename($old, $new);



This did not work as expected.  If $new actually existed then it worked fine.  That is the file found at path $new was deleted and replaced with the file found at path $old.  However, if $new did NOT exist then the result was the file at  path $old vanished into oblivion.  After debugging a bit, it seems that rename() was getting executed before the if-statement.  So rename() moved $old to $new, THEN the if-statement evaluated to true and deleted the file I just moved.  Anyway, this fixed it:



if(file_exists($new)) { 

    unlink($new);

    $ok = rename($old, $new);

} else { $ok = rename($old, $new); }



Very strange ... I hope this helps somebody

sophie at sitadelle dot com
14-Nov-2003 08:22


Hello!

For unix/linux users: it is usefull to know that if you use rename() for a directory, the new one will be created with the current umask!

blujay
08-Feb-2002 01:32


You can always chdir() to the parent directory of what you're renaming, and rename the directory or file directly.  For example:



$oldWD = getcwd();

chdir($dirWhereRenameeIs);

rename($oldFilename, $newFilename);

chdir($oldWD);

pearcec at commnav dot com
15-Jun-2001 01:17


If you rename one directory to another where the second directory exists as an empty directory it will not complain.





Not what I expected.





[pearcec@abe tmp]$ mkdir test1


[pearcec@abe tmp]$ mkdir test2


[pearcec@abe tmp]$ touch test1/test


[pearcec@abe tmp]$ php


<?php


rename("test1","test2");


?>


X-Powered-By: PHP/4.0.5


Content-type: text/html





[pearcec@abe tmp]$ ls -al


total 12


drwxr-xr-x    3 pearcec  commnav      4096 Jun 15 13:17 .


drwxr-xr-x   18 pearcec  commnav      4096 Jun 15 13:15 ..


drwxr-xr-x    2 pearcec  commnav      4096 Jun 15 13:16 test2


[pearcec@abe tmp]$ ls -la test2/


total 8


drwxr-xr-x    2 pearcec  commnav      4096 Jun 15 13:16 .


drwxr-xr-x    3 pearcec  commnav      4096 Jun 15 13:17 ..


-rw-r--r--    1 pearcec  commnav         0 Jun 15 13:16 test


[pearcec@abe tmp]$

michael-nospam at sal dot mik dot hyperlink dot net dot au
24-Nov-1999 11:43


Note, that on Unix, a rename is a beautiful way of getting atomic updates to files.





Just copy the old contents (if necessary), and write the new contents into a new file, then rename over the original file.





Any processes reading from the file will continue to do so, any processes trying to open the file while you're writing to it will get the old file (because you'll be writing to a temp file), and there is no "intermediate" time between there being a file, and there not being a file (or there being half a file).





Oh, and this only works if you have the temp file and the destination file on the same filesystem (eg. partition/hard-disk).

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