Blog Posts tagged ‘all files’

We’ve discovered some interesting things about Windows, and they never fail to cause some head-scratching. We had cause to go rooting through a customer’s wordpress installation recently to hunt down the cause of PHP errors, and discovered two WTFs here.

The first was the breakage of various scripts in the wp-admin directory. Through means unknown, every array definition was broken by the addition of a file path. If you grok PHP, you’ll recognise that this isn’t syntactically valid:

$defaults = array(

'show_option_all'../../../wordpress/wp-includes/ => '',
'show_option_none'../../../wordpress/wp-includes/ => ''

);

Python is our preferred in-house language, but breadth of knowledge is more important for a sysadmin. Cleaning up the PHP was a snap, but it’s a mystery as to how this happened in the first place; according to the customer it “just stopped working”. It looks a bit like someone got busy with a site-wide find-and-replace. This isn’t implausible, but it seems far less likely given that this is on a Windows machine.

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