[simast]

I assume you are talking about fopen-type of functions that are nothing more but wrappers around C standard library functionality.

Use SplFileObject (part of SPL that is part of PHP core) for object-oriented way to manipulate files. On a failure (like your permission issue) it throws Exceptions and if not handled this will result in a "hard" error with a backtrace log.

[cheald]

Awesome, thank you. I'm a bit rusty on best practices since I've shifted my focus away from php, but it's nice to know that options to make it behave a bit more high level exist.