unlink() does not clear the cache if you are performing file_exists() on a remote file like:

<?php
if (file_exists("ftp://ftp.example.com/somefile"))
?>

In this case, even after you unlink() successfully, you must call clearstatcache().

<?php
unlink("ftp://ftp.example.com/somefile");
clearstatcache();
?>

file_exists() then properly returns false.

Not documented, but seems like clearstatcache() is clearing the cache only for the process it is being called from. I have 2 PHP scripts running simultaneously, and the first one does call clearstatcache(), but still the second one deadlocks, unless I call clearstatcache() in it too:

script1:
<?php
    touch('system.lock');
    ...
    unlink('system.lock');
    clearstatcache(); // should be done by unlink?
?>

script2:
<?php
    while (is_file('system.lock') {
        sleep(1);
        clearstatcache(); // without this, script 2 will deadlock forever!
    }
?>

I also found this page, which leads to the same conclusion:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9251237/clearstatcache-include-path-sessions

clearstatcache() does not canonicalize the path. clearstatcache(true, "/a/b/c") is different from clearstatcache(true, "/a/b//c").

Note that this function affects only file metadata. However, all the PHP file system functions do their own caching of actual file contents as well. You can use the "realpath_cache_size = 0" directive in PHP.ini to disable the content caching if you like. The default content caching timeout is 120 seconds.

Content caching is not a good idea during development work and for certain kinds of applications, since your code may read in old data from a file whose contents you have just changed.

Note: This is separate from the caching typically done by browsers for all GET requests (the majority of Web accesses) unless the HTTP headers override it. It is also separate from optional Apache server caching.

Just to make this more obvious (and so search engines find this easier):

If you do fileops of any kind outside of PHP (say via a system() call), you probably want to clear the stat cache before doing any further tests on the file/dir/whatever.  For example:

<?php
// is_dir() forces a stat call, so the cache is populated
if( is_dir($foo) ) {
    system("rm -rf " . escapeshellarg($foo));
    if( is_dir($foo) ) {
        // ...will still be true, even if the rm succeeded, because it's just
        // reading from cache, not re-running the stat()
    }
}
?>

Pop a clearstatcache() after the system call and all is good (modulo a bit of a performance hit from having a cleared stat cache :-( ).

Definition of $filename parameter let's you think that it expects the filename only but it works if you give the path + filename also.

It should be more clear about this.