Beginning PHP 5.3

Chapter 11. Working with Files and Directories

As a server-side programming language, PHP allows you to work with files and directories stored on the Web server. This is very useful, because it means your PHP scripts can store information outside the scripts themselves.

Files are stored in directories on a hard drive, and because they retain their data after the computer is shut down, they are a persistent storage mechanism, instead of temporary storage such as RAM. Directories are a special kind of file made for storing other files. Directories are created hierarchically inside other directories, starting with the root (top-level) directory and proceeding down from there.

Files can contain any kind of data, and also can contain quite a bit of information about themselves, such as who owns them and when they were created. PHP makes working with the file system easy by including functions that allow you to obtain information about files, as well as open, read from, and write to them.

This chapter is all about the PHP functions for working with the file system. You learn:

• More about files and directories, and how to find out more information about them in your scripts

• How to open and close files, as well as how to read data from, and write data to, files

• The concept of file permissions and how to work with them

• How to copy, move, and delete files

• All about working with directories, including reading their contents, creating them, and deleting them

As well as learning the theory of file and ...