Why won't this fopen() or file() work?

Hi all,
I'm trying to creat a text login file. Problem is that sometimes the previously written user|time is not retained, and sometime the time is truncated and place on a newline as a new entry.
This code should just open the file, build the current array based on appropriate amount of lapsed time, and then put the current user in the file along with the array.

$tnow=date("Gi");
$in=file("TestingIN.txt");

$flag=0;
$cnt = count($in);
for ($x=0;$x < $cnt;$x++) {
list($u_in,$time_in)=split("|",$in[$x]);

if ("$u" != "$u_in") { //If they dont compare.
if ($time_in>$tnow) {
$tnow1=$tnow+240; //Compensate for different day. Midnight is 000!!
if (($tnow1-$time_in) < 5) { //KEEP if less 5 min.
$old_in[]=$in[$x];
$flag++;
} else {
//Do Nothing
}
} elseif ($time_in < $tnow) {
if (($tnow - $time_in) < 5 ) {
$old_in[]=$in[$x];
$flag++;
} else {
//Do Nothing
}
} else {
//Do Nothing
}
}//END if they dont compare.
}

$newinfo="$u|$tnown";

$in2=fopen("TestingIN.txt","w");

$fp=fputs($in2,$newinfo, 40);

for($y=0;$y < $flag;$y++) {
$fp=fputs($in2, $old_in[$y], 40);
}
fclose($in2);

Any ideas why this won't work as stated?

Thanks in advance!

Why not use a db? You're making your life very difficult.

I have thought about it, but was thinking that since there will be an enourmous amount of traffic with this script...I didn't wan't to have that many hits on my SINGLE instance of a database on the web server I'm on.

file() keeps the newline on the end of each array element. It seems to me that you have a pipe delimited file. Just do this:

Thanks guyer for the suggestion...I'll give it a whirl!

there is a solution to db driven authentication system that doesn't access db on every page request. look at this nice phpbuilder article:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000505.php3