Why is it not possible to delete a file using unlink with a URL as the file name in PHP?

When using unlink in PHP to delete a file, the file name must be a local file path, not a URL. This is because unlink operates on local files within the server's file system. To delete a file using a URL, you would need to first convert the URL to a local file path using functions like parse_url or realpath. 

$url = 'http://example.com/file.txt';
$localFilePath = realpath(basename($url));

if (file_exists($localFilePath)) {
    unlink($localFilePath);
    echo 'File deleted successfully.';
} else {
    echo 'File not found.';
}

Keywords

unlink file deletion URL file name PHP

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