Webmaster in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Directory Functions

The following functions are used to manipulate directories. For example, to open the current directory and read in all the entries, you can do something like this:

$handle = opendir('.'); 
while($entry = readdir($handle)) { 
echo "$entry<br>;
} 
closedir($handle);

PHP supports a dir class that represents a directory:

class dir(string directory)

This class has properties for the directory handle and class and methods for reading, rewinding, and closing the directory.

Here are the directory functions supported by PHP:

int chdir(string directory)

Change the current directory

void closedir(int dir_handle)

Close the directory connection identified by the dir_handle

int opendir(string directory)

Open a directory and return a dir_handle

string readdir(int dir_handle)

Read a directory entry from dir_handle

void rewinddir(int dir_handle)

Rewind dir_handle back to the start