Creating directories with PHP

[mattheww]

Its fine creating intial directories, but if i want to create a directory within a directory i am running into problems, here teh code i have so far...

  if ($_POST['createdir']){
    $newdir = $_POST['name'];
    $dir = $_GET['dir'];
    $root = getcwd();
    $create = mkdir("$root/dir/$dir/$newdir", 0700);
  }

it basically takes the directory name from the URL... where it says /$dir if i replace that for it's text equivalent, and don't use a variable it works fine, but i need it to work... However i don't know what i'm doing wrong!

 

[jamesxg1]

Try

if ($_POST['createdir']){
    $newdir = $_POST['name'];
    $dir = $_GET['dir'];
    $root = getcwd();
    $create = mkdir($root . '/dir/' . $dir . '/' . $newdir . '/', 0700);
  }

 

[mattheww]

unfortunately it didn't work , thanks for your suggestion anyway!

[gizmola]

When you don't know what's happening, you have to inject something to help you debug it.  If you have the option, XDebug can also be very helpful, in terms of the additional information it can provide to you when there are errors.

 

I'd suggest you first try and debug this by setting the path you're trying to create to a variable and echoing it out.

 

if ($_POST['createdir']){
    $newdir = $_POST['name'];
    $dir = $_GET['dir'];
    $root = getcwd();
    $path = "$root/dir/$dir/$newdir";
    echo "Creating ... $path";
    $create = mkdir("$root/dir/$dir/$newdir", 0700);
  }

 

Some other notes: 

- mkdir returns true/false.  Your code is better if you check the result and handle errors.

- You should check to see if the directory already exists.  If it does mkdir fails. 

 

[p2grace]

It could also be a permission problem.  If apache can't write to the folder to create the directory, it'll fail.  As gizmola suggested, the best approach is to write logic for debugging to see exactly what is causing the error.  When all else fails, display php errors or view the php error log.

 

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors','on');

[laffin]

could also be that mkdir doesnt handle subdir creation.

in other words, it cant make a dir if the parent doesnt exixst.

but it could be a lot of things. as Gizmola said, have to trace down the problem. than come up with a solution.