php / php/php-src

`is_readable()` and `is_writable()` return false negative on Win32's network-mapped drives

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Bug Category: Filesystem OS: Windows Status: Verified
Dominant language
C
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Description

Description

Hi there, good morning PHP team!

I'm working with PHP-CLI on Windows, and part of my project checks if a file path is readable and/or writable. This works as expected if the file in in the local disk, such as C:\.

However, Windows has a feature named network-mapped drives where you can "mount" a shared folder from another host to appear as a local disk, for example the SMB network share \\computername\foo\bar can be "mounted" to Z:\. In this case, calls to file_get_contents() and file_put_contents() will actually succeed, but the corresponding calls to is_readable() and is_writable() will return false.

Consider the following code:

$my_file = "Z:\\Users\\David\\File.txt";

var_dump(
    is_readable($my_file),
    is_writable($my_file),
    file_get_contents($my_file));

This results in this output:

bool(false)
bool(false)
string(34) "I am the content of the `my_file`!"

But I expect the following output:

bool(true)
bool(true)
string(34) "I am the content of the `my_file`!"

I was curious about this behavior, so I read the documentation for is_readable(), and the only piece of useful info I found is a very old user notes contribution that says:

..."is_readable() checks whether you can do file_get_contents() or similar calls, no more, no less."
~ jo at durchholz dot org

This doesn't seem right to me, because as you can see, the file_get_contents() is clearly succeeding while the is_readable() call is failing.

Please note that the PHP-CLI is running through command line with my own user account, not as some service where it wouldn't have access to the network-mapped drive.

So, I'm curious why this happens. Can you please link me to the relevant part of the source tree that implements is_readable() and is_writable()? I'm curious why this issue exists.

Thanks!

PHP Version

PHP 8.1.13

Operating System

Windows 11 Enterprise 22H2

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the source-tree implementations of is_readable() and is_writable(), then reproduce the reported behavior on Windows 11 with the provided PHP 8.1.13 example and a network-mapped drive. Compare those checks with file_get_contents() and file_put_contents(); done means identifying the cause and documenting or fixing the discrepancy.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c, php
Domain
operating-systems
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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