PHP Cookbook

Chapter 19. Directories

Introduction

A filesystem stores a lot of additional information about files aside from their actual contents. This information includes such particulars as the file’s size, what directory it’s in, and access permissions for the file. If you’re working with files, you may also need to manipulate this metadata. PHP gives you a variety of functions to read and manipulate directories, directory entries, and file attributes. Like other file-related parts of PHP, the functions are similar to the C functions that accomplish the same tasks, with some simplifications.

Files are organized with inodes . Each file (and other parts of the filesystem, such as directories, devices, and links) has its own inode. That inode contains a pointer to where the file’s data blocks are as well as all the metadata about the file. The data blocks for a directory hold the names of the files in that directory and the inode of each file.

PHP provides two ways to look in a directory to see what files it holds. The first way is to use opendir( ) to get a directory handle, readdir( ) to iterate through the files, and closedir( ) to close the directory handle:

$d = opendir('/usr/local/images') or die($php_errormsg);
while (false !== ($f = readdir($d))) {
    // process file
}
closedir($d);

The second method is to use the directory class. Instantiate the class with dir( ), read each filename with the read( ) method, and close the directory with close( ) :

$d = dir('/usr/local/images') or ...