Change the target of a symlink with PHP

Question

How can I change the target of a symlink with PHP? Thanks.

Answer 1

PHP can execute shell commands using shell_exec or the backtick operator.

Hence:

<?php
`rm thelink`;
`ln -s /path/to/new/place ./thelink`;

This will be run as the user which is running the Apache server, so you might need to keep that in mind.

Answer 2

You can delete the existing link using unlink function and recreate the link to the new target using the symlink function.

symlink($target, $link);
.
.
unlink($link);
symlink($new_target, $link);

You need to do error checking for each of these.