perhaps you can add a sample script for other to reproduce the misbehaviour.

This is a copy of all the versions we tried, none of them worked in the slightest.

<?php

//  copy($PHP_PUT_FILENAME,$DOCUMENT_ROOT.$REQUEST_URI);
 $fp = fopen("/home/vhosts/farelist.com/www/update/log.txt","w+");
 if(!copy ($PHP_PUT_FILENAME, "/home/vhosts/farelist.com/www/update/test.txt")) {
   fwrite($fp, "\n\ncopy failed\n\n");
 } else {
   fwrite($fp, "\n\ncopy successful\n\n");
 }

 $temp="PHP_PUT_FILENAME: $PHP_PUT_FILENAME\n";
 $vars = get_defined_vars();
 foreach ($vars as $test => $value) {
  if (is_array($value)) {
   foreach ($value as $subtest => $subvalue) {
    $temp .= "$subtest: $subvalue\n";
   }
  } else {
   $temp .= "$test: $value\n";
  }
 }
 fwrite($fp, $temp);
 $temp="DOCUMENT_ROOT: $DOCUMENT_ROOT\n";
 fwrite($fp, $temp);
 $temp="REQUEST_URI: $REQUEST_URI\n";
 fwrite($fp, $temp);
 fclose($fp);
?>

Not sure if problem is documentation or PHP bug.  Excalibur's example to dump all variables duplicates my results, PHP doesn't provide temporary filename for PUT data.  Documentation says "$PHP_PUT_FILENAME" and example uses "$PHP_UPLOADED_FILE_NAME" neither of which are defined.  It does work with CGI script as data to 'stdin' but how do you read this in PHP?  Platform is Solaris 8 with PHP 4.1 in Apache 1.3.22

I can replicate the same issue with the sample code in the manual.

copy($PHP_UPLOADED_FILE_NAME,$DOCUMENT_ROOT.$REQUEST_URI);

I'm running Apache 1.3.24 with PHP 4.2.0, on RedHat 7.1... I'm guessing this either got ignored, or the variable got removed.  The header that is returned just says:

Unable to open '' for reading:  No such file or directory in <script name> on line <line no>.

Can any of you who are having this problem please provide an example of the HTML form you are supporting with the PHP code you've provided? Meaning, what is the markup and/or PHP code for the page that generates the file upload?

I think I have an idea on this.

I have duplicated this problem with PHP 4.2.1, on a Linux Mandrake system
with an Apache 1.3 server.  However, instead of a browser, I am
using the W3C libbwww sample program, put.c 
(http://www.w3.org/Library/Examples/put.c).  This is about as 
"official" a PUT command as you can get.

For a server script, I have one that is about as simple as 
you can get.

<?php
#copy($PHP_UPLOADED_FILE_NAME,"uploaded_file");
print "$PHP_UPLOADED_FILE_NAME";
?>

I've tried many variations, printing out $_POST and $_FILES, 
and other variables, all with the same empty results.
Any new ideas?

I am using FreeBSD 4.6 and mod_php4-4.2.1_2.
I am using curl to send the file.
curl -T /kernel http://server/test.dat

Interesting thing is that the PHP code is executed and terminated BEFORE the file has completed uploading. Weird.

updating version as per user comments.

PUT method is used for publishing from HTML editors.
But apache brings the data to the script to the stdin stream.
So, PHP does not accept any data. And, also, does not set up 
any variable on that score.

Sounds like the data is ending up coming from stdin;
try the following code:

$data = fopen("php://stdin", "rb");
$destfile = fopen("file_to_overwrite", "wb");
while(!feof($data)) {
   $chunk = fread($data, 4096);
   fwrite($destfile, $chunk);
}
fclose($destfile);
fclose($data);

This doesn't explain why it doesn't behave as documented,
but should be enough to get you going.

Making this a Documentation Problem; I can't find any code
that sets PHP_UPLOADED_FILE_NAME, PHP_PUT_FILENAME or
other variations, so it seems that the docs at
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.put-method.php
are just plain wrong.
However, it does seem that fopen("php://stdin", "rb") will
allow access to that data (but I haven't tried to verify this).

I couldnt get PUT to work like that, looks like this patch will solve it.

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-dev&m=102983806024466&w=2

(read the following responsed for a bit more detail on why php cant read PUT at present)

regards
Alan

This bug has been fixed in CVS.

In case this was a PHP problem, snapshots of the sources are packaged
every three hours; this change will be in the next snapshot. You can
grab the snapshot at http://snaps.php.net/.
 
In case this was a documentation problem, the fix will show up soon at
http://www.php.net/manual/.

In case this was a PHP.net website problem, the change will show
up on the PHP.net site and on the mirror sites in short time.
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.

Provided example of using php://stdin and note re: Changed behavior from PHP3.