When you have an error, you will often find that an error message get's stuck at the top of the page. If it's a function error it will, for some reason, have the function that triggered the error as a link to example.com/function.name

Failed Code Injection attempt?

The function.filemtime error is a runtime error of PHP. You won't see it in your source, but it is only generated when PHP parses your scripts. It is probably caused by a call to the PHP filemtime() function somewhere in your scripts which returns the modification time of a file. If that file doesn't exist or cannot be accessed due to permission settings, PHP will generate a runtime error to the browser window. This runtime error seems to be picked up by the Xenu link checker.

I ran the Xenu scan a few times afterward and haven't gotten it in any of the later scans.


However, upon inspecting error_log -- I get a bunch of these:

[11-Mar-2010 20:22:55] PHP Warning: filemtime() [<a href='function.filemtime'>function.filemtime</a>]: stat failed for /home/**/public_html/cache/index.php_path=22__.cache in /home/**/public_html/includes/cache.php on line 330

On line 330:

 if ( ( filemtime($filename) + $this->cache_lifetime) < time() )

As this is part of my cache function, I assume removing it would cause issues with my caching.

I suspect this error is being generated when a visitor clicks a page whose cache file was recently removed, but the content simply reloads beneath.. so this error is obsolete by the time someone clicks it. Can I suppress it without killing the rest of my php errors? (I use them for troubleshooting other scripts, but this error just baffles me.)

You can switch off all warning messages during the processing:

$old_mask = error_reporting( 0 );

if ( ( filemtime($filename) ... ) {
}

error_reporting( $old_mask );

Added that into the file. Not sure how to test it, since I can't reproduce the error, but I wiped error_log.

My last error showed at:
[11-Mar-2010 22:00:53]

Hopefully this works. Thanks for the tip so far. :)

New update:
Cache is working fine and no function.filemtime errors in error_log OR with Xenu.

Thanks a ton, lammert!

Just note that this solution doesn't solve the problem of your non-existent files, it only masks the errors which are generated. Switching off error reporting for a whole PHP script is therefore in general not a good idea. But I am glad that it helped you out in this specific situation. :)

It's a garbage collection system to remove old cache files. the missing files aren't a 'problem' per-say, but I really don't know why the script is looking for them, to be honest (which is -the- problem, if any).
They seem to show up 1 time for 1 page and never any more than that.

I didn't write the script, I'm just trying to interpret it. :)