In the 4 years since this bug/feature request was reported, flock() has been 
implemented.

I can not see any documentation to indicate that touch(), chmod() etc... are 
possible to implement with stream wrappers yet.

url_stat() is able to provide read access for these data points, but there is no 
means to provide the write access.

I will add also that if touch() gets called with a (normally stream wrapped) URL, 
it actually attempts to touch a file by that name on the local file system, most 
likely unsuccessfully (producing a WARNING) but there is no particular reason why 
it could not be successful in some situation.

Better/safer behavior would be to give an ERROR that you are trying to touch a 
stream wrapped file which can't be touched (or preferably of course, implement 
the ability for stream wrappers to accommodate touch()).

I implemented my own stream, named "localexe" on the Windows platform 
(using C, not php user streams).

1)
The realpath('localexe://localhost/teststream.php'); should return 
"localexe://localhost/teststream.php", because it exists. 
Currently it returns false.

2)
The chdir('localexe://localhost/'); results in "Warning:  chdir() 
[function.chdir]: No such file or directory (errno 2) in 
localexe://localhost/teststream.php on line 383"

3)
Because chdir(); does not work with streams, the include('./testinclude1.php'); 
also doesn't work.

----

I tracked down in the sources to tsrm_virtual_cwd.h. 
This is a layer on Windows to implement GetCurrentDirectory() avoiding
thread issues. 
This layer  can't handle any custom stream, it always uses the local
filesystem.
I think this is the main problem.

Since 5.4 there is a stream_metadata:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/streamwrapper.stream-metadata.php
which offers support for:
* touch()
* chmod()
* chown()
* chgrp()

I can confirm that for example symlink() is unfortunately still missing!