Programming:Terrible code

3 June 2008

Bad news: broken chdir

Worse news: continuing after broken chdir

I saw the above, so I was like, WTF? and went to find the code below, which runs on our live server. The same code runs on our test server which uses different data. And runs on our other test server which uses a different directory structure.

<source lang="php"> <?php

// snip

$cwd = getcwd(); chdir('/var/apache/ssl/htdocs/admin/csv/user/'); $fileList = array(); $dateList = array();

if ($dir = opendir(".")) {

      $i = 0;
      while (false !== ($file = readdir($dir))) {
              if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
                      $fileList[$i] = $file;
                      $dateList[$i] = date("Y/m/d H:i:s", fileatime($file));
                      $i++;
              }
      }
      closedir($dir);

} chdir($cwd);

// snip

?> </source>

There are some redeeming qualities to this code:

1. it's indented per block level
2. it doesn't allow . nor .. to be processed
3. it closes its file handle $dir
4. it saves and restores its working directory after it's done.

There are also, however, a couple of points that are not as redeeming.

1. hard coding '/var/apache/ssl/htdocs/admin/csv/user/'
2. not checking to see if the hard code worked

In preparing to fix them, I found this, or should I say these: