Is there a way to toggle the "Hidden" or "Read-Only" switches on a Windows file using PHP?

Question

UPDATED

As the title says, is there a way to toggle the "Hidden" or "Read-Only" switch on Windows using PHP?

I'd like to do this without opening a shell exec() if possible.

Answer 1

A file can't be hidden, it's always in the file system. There's the *NIX convention that files starting with a . are not shown by default for certain operations (like the ls command), but only if you don't look hard enough. The same goes for Windows, but Windows handles it with file meta attributes.

What you can/should do is use file permissions to make the folder/file inaccessible to anybody who has no business accessing it. Use chmod, chown and chgrp to do so from PHP. You may have to learn a bit about proper file system permissions though.

Answer 2

To make a file "hidden" on Windows you can use

attrib +h yourfile.ext

To make a file "read-only" on Windows you can use

attrib +r yourfile.ext

To use these commands from PHP you just execute them using system or exec.

Also see : Attrib