php apache and temporary files

[vawarcato]

I have a web based application which server's content to authenticated users by interacting with a soap server. The soap server has file's which the user's need to be able to download. What is the best way to serve these files to users? When a user requests a file, my server will make a soap call to the soap server to pull the file and then it will serve it to the user via referencing the link to it. The question is that these temporary files need to be cleaned up at some point and my first thought was this being a linux based system, store them in /tmp/ and let the system take care of cleanup. \[code\]Is it possible to store these files in /tmp and have apache serve them to the user? \[/code\]If apache cannot access /tmp since it is outside of the web root, potentially I could create a symbolic link to /tmp/filename within the web root? (This would require cleanup of the symbolic links though at some point.) Suggestions/comments appreciated on best way to manage these temporary files? \[code\]I am aware that I could write a script and have it executed as a cron job on regular intervals but was wondering if there was a way similar to presented above to do this and not have to handle deleting the files? \[/code\]