Navigating Directories - PHP

In this article we are going to look at how to upload files and also how to navigate through directories. It is the second part of a tutorial that began last week with "Reading, Writing, and Creating Files in PHP."

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

By: Jacques Noah

Poor Best

Rating:

/ 8

August 30, 2006

print this article

SEARCH DEV SHED

TOOLS YOU CAN USE

Before we start with the next section, please make sure that you are familiar with file permissions. Pretty much everything in the File Permissions section applies to the directories. To navigate through a directory, you begin by opening the directory with opdir() function:

$dir = opendir('directoryname');

As with reading and writing files, you create a pointer that can be referenced by the opened directory. To read the list of files within a directory you use the readdir() function, in a while loop:

while($thedir=readdir($dir)){
//write the file details here
}

and then you finally close the open directory with the closedir() function:

closedir($dir);

Other functions that we are going to use include:

filesize() function - gives you the size of the file in bytes.

filetime() - retrieves the modification time of a file.

Both of these functions are going to help us to create a directory listing.

Let's build a script that will show us the insides of a directory listing:

Script: browsedir.php

This script will list file names, file size and modification dates:

<html>
<head>
<title>Browse Directories</title>
</head>
<body>
Browsing
<?php
$current_dir = '.';
$dir = opendir($current_dir);
echo "Current directory is $current_dir ";
echo' <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1">
<tr>
 <td width="34%">File Name </td>
 <td width="26%"> File Size </td>
 <td width="40%">Last Modified </td>
</tr>';
while ($file = readdir($dir))
{
$fs=filesize($file);
$moddate=date('F j, Y',filemtime($file));
echo ' <tr>
 <td>'.$file.'</td>
 <td>'.$fs. ' bytes</td>
 <td>'.$moddate.'</td>';