Posted by Nicholas Sherlock on 02/11/06 12:56

Hey all,

People on my website register to be allowed access to certain downloads.
I store these files above the document root so that they can't be
accessed by Apache (Only from PHP). I wrote a file serving script which
dumps the correct headers for the download and calls readfile().

I thought everything was going swimmingly until I realized that my
webhost has Safe Mode turned on, and the script execution time is
limited to 30 seconds. If your file takes longer than that to download,
then too bad :).

So how can I do this? The files that I am serving are no larger than
about 2 megabytes.

It seems that one option would be to make a copy of the file I want to
serve, but below the document root so that it is available from the
browser. I'd give the file a randomly generated name that couldn't just
be guessed, and just write a regular link to the browser. Has anyone
tried this, and did it work out okay for you? How did you go about
cleaning up files after the client has downloaded them? Is there a
better option?

Cheers,
Nicholas Sherlock

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