As Sameer Borate points out in his latest post to his blog, there's a way to disable that pesky suppression operator (@) in your PHP installation thanks to the scream extension.

PHP supports one error control operator: the at sign (@). When prepended to an expression any error generated by that expression will be ignored. It can also be useful for hiding errors generated by various functions. [...] Although quite useful at some times, using the @-operator can have some annoying side effects.

He shows you how to install the extension on a stock Ubuntu platform (including the PHP packages) and how use the feature in your application by means of a call to ini_set (or, of course, setting it in your php.ini file).

In this new entry to his blog Quinton Parker looks at some strangeness he's found around the try/catch functionality in PHP. His specific example involves file_get_contents.

PHP never ceases to amaze me. Just the other day a colleague discovered that you can suppress error messages reported by file_get_contents() using the try-catch statement. That should’ve raised an eyebrow.

His sample code shows the normal error that a file_get_contents on a nonexistent file would give then wraps it in a try/catch. The same path is put into the file_get_contents but, because of some sort of interesting handling, isn't reported in the catch. He's at a loss and is asking for help figuring this one out from the readers out there. Be sure to leave a comment if you have more info.