Any better way than time()

Craig321 · 24 Jan 2006 at 19:28

Hi,

Currently, infront of the name of files uploaded onto my site I put a time stamp (time()). Sometimes the time stamp is up to 10 digits out compared to the link meaning sometimes they don't work and I have to change the name of the file to make it work.

Is there anything better than time() I can use that will avoid this problem please?

[Edit]
Also, I put a time stamp in to avoid people uploading a file named the same as another file, as this would overwrite the other file.

Thanks
Craig.

Craig321 · 24 Jan 2006 at 19:56

True, but most of the time it works, just sometimes the link is a few out for some reason.

I'll check out rand and uniqeid and see if I like them

Thanks
Craig

Craig321 · 24 Jan 2006 at 20:05

So do you rename the whole image to a random MD5? Or just a md5 at the beginning?

Craig321 · 24 Jan 2006 at 20:26

Has as in http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.hash-file.php ?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "or if the filename was too long I'd truncate it and add it to the end". ?

Thanks
Craig.

Craig321 · 25 Jan 2006 at 16:41

OK, I noticed that on the upload part i was doing time() . before the filename and then on the SQL part I was doing time() . before the filename meaning sometimes they might have been slightly out... which they were. So instead I did this:

$time = time();

And then instead of using time() before the filename I used $time

It hasn't gone wrong since

Thanks for the help everyone
Craig

Craig321 · 26 Jan 2006 at 01:45

Good idea, I think I'll add a md5 of the users IP instead of a timestamp

Thanks
Craig

Craig321 · 26 Jan 2006 at 02:37

Was thinking that, that md5 uniqid time thingy is pretty good but it's a little long, makes the filename real long

Could I use rand() on it's own? Would there be any down sides to that?

Thanks
Craig.