Topic: PHP questiony thingy

So a thought occurred in mine head, is it possible in PHP to give a certain file a time limit.
It was an idea for my, probably rather childish authentication system...

A file would be created with a random string and that string is passed from form to form on the site while looking around the admin features,
but there would be an inactivity time limit, that is reset every time you load a page with the key. Eg if you don't load anything for 5 minutes the file is removed so you would be required to log back in.

Or something.

A cookie with a life of 5 minutes? Reset its creation time everytime you load the page.

http://www.php.net/set_cookie

(Edited by Nathus on 04-03-2006 21:30)

I would instead suggest using sessions and setting max_lifetime, cookie_expire, and the whole sh-bang:
http://ca.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php

Edit: Um, there is no "cookie_expire". There's "cookie_lifetime" and "cache_expire", but they had no lovechildren. Alas, the saga continues.

HTH,
DC

(Edited by divinechaos on 04-04-2006 04:59)

Assuming I can do that without using HTTP authentication (brain too tired at the moment to read) sessions actually sounds like a pretty good idea.

I think I saw that once a while ago when I was starting to code this site...but some reason passed on it.
I'll definitely investigate the both options when I have more time and energy and continue to post adventures here.

Thanks for the input.

I did a quick search of the archives for the planetary locator map - found the original threads but not the actual map.