That construct is most frequently used to test whether a resource handle can be acquired so that your script can determine whether it can perform operations on the handle. For example, the following code would test to see if $fp is a valid file handle:
PHP Code:
if($fp = @fopen('some_file.dat','r')) {
fread($fp,filesize('some_file.dat'));
fclose($fp);
}
Prefixing the "@" symbol to a function name suppresses any error message that would be printed if the attempt to acquire a handle failed.