bluevd at gmail dot com mentioned a hit counter. In his/her implementation, the file is first opened, read, closed, then opened +truncated, then written, and closed again. An alternative to this is:
<?php
$file = 'counter.txt or whatever';
$handle = fopen ($file, 'r+'); // Let's open for read and write
$count = int (fread ($handle, filesize ($file)));
// We don't want to think it's a string and try appending
echo "Number of hits $count";
rewind ($handle); // Go back to the beginning
/*
* Note that we don't have problems with 9 being fewer characters than
* 10 because we are always incrementing, so we will always write at
* least as many characters as we read
**/
fwrite ($handle, ++$count); // Don't forget to increment the counter
fclose ($handle); // Done
?>