removing multiple files from a web-directory using foreach() function - php

Question

I want to delete multiple files from my directory, and for this I am using the following code
$x=array(".index.php",".code.html","about.txt");
foreach($x as $a)
unlink($a);
The wired thing with this code is that it sometime works and sometimes doesn't, and no errors.
Is there anything that I am missing?

Answer 1

Add some monitoring to your code, to see what happens:
foreach($x as $a) {
echo "File $a ";
if (file_exists($a)) {
if (is_file($a)) {
echo "is a regular file ";
} else {
echo "is not a regular file ";
}
if (is_link($a)) {
echo "is a symbolic link ";
}
if (is_readable($a)) {
echo " readable";
} else {
echo " NOT readable";
}
if (is_writeable($a)) {
echo " and writeable ";
} else {
echo " and NOT writeable ";
}
echo "owned by ";
echo posix_getpwuid(fileowner($a)) ['name'];
if (unlink($a)) {
echo "- was removed<br />\n";
} else {
echo "- was NOT removed<br />\n";
}
} else {
echo "doesn't exist<br />\n";
}
}
Also read this comment on the PHP manual page about unlinking files.
If you have to use a path for your file, convert it to a real path with the function realpath() - see https://php.net/manual/en/function.realpath.php