All the filesystem-related functions (unlink, fopen, unlink, etc) seems to be restricted the same way in safe mode, at least on PHP 4.2. If the file UID is different *but* the directory (where the file is located) UID is the same, it will work. So creating a directory in safe mode is usually a bad idea since the UID will be different from the script (it will be the apache UID) so it won't be possible to do anything with the files created on this directorysource http://fr2.php.net/features.safe-mode