Are there any best practices for securely deleting files using PHP?

When securely deleting files using PHP, it is important to ensure that the file is completely removed from the server and cannot be recovered. One common approach is to overwrite the file with random data before deleting it, making it much harder for anyone to retrieve the original content. 

$file = 'example.txt';

// Overwrite the file with random data
$randomData = openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(filesize($file));
file_put_contents($file, $randomData);

// Delete the file
unlink($file);

Keywords

file deletion security PHP unlink file permissions

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