Temporary File Storage Directory

[Kevin Barsotti]

To preface: I did not set up Pear on the system that I am administrating nor do I have more than cursory familiarity with the Pear system; that being said, I am an experienced developer and educable in such matters.

The ExcelWriter module is being used in the PHP-based software system I am working with; the files that the system produces using that module are being written to /tmp, the temporary partition on the Linux file system. A problem has arisen insofar as that these files are numerous and of not inconsiderable size, and have begun to completely fill the partition. They're still being accessed, which prevents me from taking the simple step of removing them.

Would the logic telling the system where to save these files to be some default in the configuration file for PEAR, or for PHP, or is this directory choice assigned specifically on a case-by-case basis? I'm just not sure where to start looking, to update the software to write these files to a specifically set-aside area on a much larger partition. Any insights that could be provided would be wholeheartedly appreciated.

[mark]

I doubt that the files are still accessed. In fact, they are usually removed once the Excel file was generated. (That's at least the behaviour that I know from various installations of the Excel writer package.)

You can change the directory that is used by the OLE package via SEW's setTempDir() method:
http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.fileformats.spreadsheet-excel-writer.spreadsheet-excel-writer-workbook.settempdir.php

The Worksheet class also generates temporary files, but setTempDir() has no effect on these files. If you don't like the usage of PHP's tmpfile() function (and its choice of the temporary directory), you can disable the usage of temporary files by the Worksheet class by setting the (private!) property $_using_tmpfile to boolean false.

[Kevin Barsotti]

If there were not evidence in access logs on the server file system to indicate that the files are seeing recent use (ones created weeks ago were last accessed hours or days ago) I would not be so concerned about delicate handling of the problem; I will look into setTempDir() in order to give the files a larger area to reside.

What I suspect is happening is that the files are generated in the temp directory, delivered once, but subsequent attempts to generate and deliver them first check their existence and, in the event that they are found, retrieves rather than generating them anew.

[mark]

[Kevin Barsotti]

[mark]

[Kevin Barsotti]

[mark]