Is it possible to fclose a file after 30 minutes of time?

I'm using it to create a temporary file, then the user can download it, and hoping that the file can be deleted after about 30 mins, otherwise how could the user download it, unless they were quicker than the browser.

EDIT

Will unlink() do this?

I don't think no...
As the PHP model (like any "web" server side language) is a fire and forget, you can only keep your file open the time the page load and the PHP engine is running.

Just a side note here, windows prevents you from deleting an opened file; Linux/Unix is not.
Even if someone is editing a file, someone else can do a delete of that file, and nobody will see anything.
unlink is nothing else than the delete command.

For what you need to do, you will need to wrap the access around a PHP access method, and it's that PHP file that will restrict the access.

So I can't set a timer for the file to exist? 30 minutes and then delete.

Maybe there's some kind of if else statement that will work.

PHP Code:

if (timepassed > 30 minutes || user exits page) {
  fclose($handle)
} 


anything along the lines of that??

You will need to store the access time somewhere then, and check periodically.
Or to set an AT job for it, but as each process is fired and die in the page construction, you have no way to monitor it all the time.

In fact, yes, there is a way, but out of the scope of a web site.
You can write threaded with the pcntl [ http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.pcntl.php ] functions (I did this in the paste), and run it as a service, but this is totally different than web development.

Thanks, I just learnt a bit more about creating / writing files and so I done this instead

fopen
fwrite
fclose

headers (make them download)

unlink (delete)

Works a treat May not be 30 mins, but the page is deleted instantly, and a refresh writes the file again

You can use a function that checks the modification time of the file...

if (filemtime('path/of/filename.txt') > time() + (60*30)) unlink('path/of/filename.txt');

You can use a function that checks the modification time of the file...

Yep, it's true, but just remember that this function use cached results.
If you want to have the up to date infos, call a clearstatcache() [ http://www.php.net/manual/en/functio...rstatcache.php ] before

crontab, find /path/to/files -type f -cmin +30 -delete

I used to think fclose deleted the file, now I realise unkink does