Valid use cases for at-sign in php

Question

The at sign is used to hide error messages. As far as I see, there is absolutely no use case or excuse for using it.

1. You can hide errors in production by changing

Answer 1

There are a few rare situations where it indeed makes sense to use error suppression.

One of them are atomic filesystem operations. E.g. instead of writing

if (file_exists($fileName)) {
    unlink($fileName);
}

you just do

@unlink($fileName);

This makes sure that your code is not subject to race conditions.

Generally @ is useful in situations where PHP chose an inappropriate error model for a function. The above unlink function is one such example. Similarly there are other functions where PHP throws errors, even though it shouldn't (instead using return values or catchable exceptions).