PHP Functions Essential Reference

Overview

PHP’s filesystem functions provide a fairly broad range of functionality. All the standard functions that programmers expect are included—opening, reading, and writing files; querying the filesystem; changing permissions; copying and deleting files; etc. Many of these functions have been transparently extended to work with HTTP and FTP resources, allowing easy reading of remote files.

There are also a series of convenience functions like fgetcsv(), which parses CSV-format data while reading it from a file, and file(), which reads a file and then places it, line by line, into an array.

The group also includes some miscellaneous filesystem-related functions to generate names for temporary files (tempnam() ) and open pipes to commands ...