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Because I needed a working project today - I installed a previous snapshopt of PHP-5.3 which did not have this issue. On sunday, I will surely reinstall the problematic snapshot and provide a trace.

I've just installed the latest snapshot of PHP-5.3 and the problem persists. The dump:

#0  0x00000000 in ?? ()
#1  0xb71feef8 in phar_is_file (ht=1, return_value=0x83db0b8, return_value_ptr=0x0, this_ptr=0x0, return_value_used=0, tsrm_ls=0x83c5a70)
    at /home/vbolshov/src/php/php5.3-200807280630/ext/phar/func_interceptors.c:956
#2  0xb73f3828 in zend_do_fcall_common_helper_SPEC (execute_data=0x84a0a70, tsrm_ls=0x83c5a70)
    at /home/vbolshov/src/php/php5.3-200807280630/Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:313
#3  0xb73e00b5 in execute (op_array=0x83dac2c, tsrm_ls=0x83c5a70) at /home/vbolshov/src/php/php5.3-200807280630/Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:104
#4  0xb73bad2f in zend_execute_scripts (type=8, tsrm_ls=0x83c5a70, retval=0x0, file_count=3) at /home/vbolshov/src/php/php5.3-200807280630/Zend/zend.c:1199
#5  0xb73617d5 in php_execute_script (primary_file=0xb44c41f0, tsrm_ls=0x83c5a70) at /home/vbolshov/src/php/php5.3-200807280630/main/main.c:2088
#6  0xb744fa48 in php_handler (r=0x83cac20) at /home/vbolshov/src/php/php5.3-200807280630/sapi/apache2handler/sapi_apache2.c:630
#7  0x08079639 in ap_run_handler ()
#8  0x0807ca47 in ap_invoke_handler ()
#9  0x08089d60 in ap_process_request ()
#10 0x0808706b in ?? ()
#11 0x083cac20 in ?? ()
#12 0x00000004 in ?? ()
#13 0x083cac20 in ?? ()
#14 0x00000000 in ?? ()

--------------------
Source code for the script was:

<?php

is_file("x");

The problem is still here with PHP-5.3.0alpha

Here is a patch for it (made by Dmitry):
http://dev.daylessday.org/diff/bug45613.diff

Dmitry, please submit, patch looks correct.

This bug has been fixed in CVS.

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/.
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.