Have coding using fopen, fwrite, but webhost no longer allows

Hiya,

Below is the index file of an open source program I'm trying to install in a folder of my website. My webhost doesn't allow the fopen function (and I would guess that includes fwrite, but I've no idea about "touch"). CURL is enabled on the server, but I can't quite get it to do everything.

Alternatively, I figured that all perhaps all this does is create and write an .htaccess file containing the line:
php_value include_path "/export/home/webhost2_c/www.epigenome.org.uk/WWW/CMS/phpcg/app/settings/"
Naturally all I get are 500 - internal error messages. Aargh!

<?php
      $path_parts = pathinfo($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']);
      $ROOT = $path_parts['dirname'];
      $ROOT = $ROOT."/app/settings/";
      $filename = ".htaccess";
      echo $ROOT ."<br>"; // me testing
      // $ROOT is /export/home/webhost2_c/www.epigenome.org.uk/WWW/CMS/phpcg/app/settings/
      
      if (!file_exists($filename)) {
         touch (".htaccess");
         $fp = fopen($filename, "w") or die("Couldn't open $filename");
               fwrite($fp, "php_value include_path \"".$ROOT."\"\n");
               fclose($fp);
            
               include("install.php");
            header( 'Location: index.php' );
      }
?>

Server info is:
Apache/2.0.58 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.58 OpenSSL/0.9.8d DAV/2 PHP/5.1.2 mod_jk2/2.0.2
--with-curl=/usr/local/include/curl' '--with-curlwrappers' '
.htaccess is enabled

Would really appreciate any help. Servers are a bit of a black box to me and I've been playing with this for far too long. Start Free Trial