Can I use file_get_contents() to compare two files?

Question

I want to synchronize two directories. And I use

file_get_contents($source) === file_get_contents($dest)

to compare two files. Is there an

Answer 1

Ths will work, but is inherently more inefficient than calculating checksum for both files and comparing these. Good candidates for checksum algorithms are SHA1 and MD5.

http://php.net/sha1_file

http://php.net/md5_file

if (sha1_file($source) == sha1_file($dest)) {
    /* ... */
}