A small function was experimenting with for the PEAR REST cache saving. It was open to link attacks (soft/hard links), attempting to take care of the time-of-check-time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition as well as being able to create and/or update a cache f

gistfile1.php

<?php
function saveCacheFile($file, $contents)
{
    $serialized = serialize($contents);
    $len = strlen($serialized);

    $cachefile_fp = @fopen($file, 'xb'); // x is the O_CREAT|O_EXCL mode
    if ($cachefile_fp !== false) { // create file
        if (fwrite($cachefile_fp, $serialized, $len) < $len) {
            return PEAR::raiseError("Could not write $file.");
        }
        fclose($cachefile_fp);
    } else { // update file
        $cachefile_lstat = lstat($file);
        $cachefile_fp = @fopen($file, 'wb');
        if (!$cachefile_fp) {
            return PEAR::raiseError("Could not open $file for writing.");
        }

        $cachefile_fstat = fstat($cachefile_fp);
        if (
          $cachefile_lstat['mode'] == $cachefile_fstat['mode'] &&
          $cachefile_lstat['ino']  == $cachefile_fstat['ino'] &&
          $cachefile_lstat['dev']  == $cachefile_fstat['dev']
        ) {
            if (fwrite($cachefile_fp, $serialized, $len) < $len) {
                return PEAR::raiseError("Could not write $file.");
            }
            fclose($cachefile_fp);
        }
    }

    return true;
}