Why does fopen("/dev/fd/x", "r") fail ?

It seams to work if the file descriptor is a pipe, but it fails on network sockets.

Example:

testfd.php:
#!/usr/local/bin/php -q
<?php

echo `ls -l /dev/fd/`;

$stdin = fopen('/dev/fd/0', 'r');
$stdout = fopen('/dev/fd/1', 'w');

?>

Server:
tcpserver 127.0.0.1 8000 ./testfd.php

Client:
mattias@icebox:~$ nc localhost 8000
total 0
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:35 0 -> socket:[2611215]
l-wx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:35 1 -> pipe:[2611234]
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:35 2 -> /dev/pts/3
lr-x------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:35 3 -> /proc/12706/fd
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:35 4 -> socket:[2611215]
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:35 5 -> socket:[2611215]
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:35 6 -> /dev/pts/3

Warning: fopen(/dev/fd/0): failed to open stream: No such device or address in /home/mattias/projects/jssocket/tests/testfd on line 6

Warning: fopen(/dev/fd/1): failed to open stream: No such device or address in /home/mattias/projects/jssocket/tests/testfd on line 7


If we run the script without tcpserver we get this:

mattias@icebox:~$ ./testfd
total 0
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:37 0 -> /dev/pts/3
l-wx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:37 1 -> pipe:[2611379]
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:37 2 -> /dev/pts/3
lr-x------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:37 3 -> /proc/12709/fd
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:37 4 -> /dev/pts/3
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:37 5 -> /dev/pts/3
lrwx------    1 mattias  mattias        64 2003-11-07 13:37 6 -> /dev/pts/3


Notice the difference, also notice that /dev/fd is a symlink  to /proc/self/fd:
mattias@icebox:~$ ls -l /dev/fd
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           13 2001-12-21 18:29 /dev/fd -> /proc/self/fd


This is on Debian unstable, Linux 2.4.21. I noticed this when i moved a script from FreeBSD 4.8 to Linux.

I think this is unrelated to PHP and very Linux specific, I wrote a C prgoram and run it with tcpserver on FreeBSD and Linux. On FreeBSD it works fine, but on Linux i get this error:
open in: No such device or address
open out: No such device or address

I also found this, so maybe this is solved in Linux 2.6?
http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/msg.php3?msg_id=3374944&list=35

#include <unistd.h>                                                                   #include <sys/types.h>                                                                #include <sys/stat.h>                                                                 #include <fcntl.h>                                                                    
int main()
{
    int in;
    int out;
    
    in = open("/dev/fd/0", O_RDONLY);
    if(in == -1)
        perror("open in");
    
    out = open("/dev/fd/1", O_WRONLY);
    if(out == -1)
        perror("open out");

    if(out != -1)
        write(out, "test\n", 5);
    
    return 0;
}

Linux bugs are not PHP bugs..

Marking as closed as this was implemented for 5.3/trunk.

See also bug #53465.