Auto delete all files after x-time

Question

How do you auto delete all files under a sub directory after x-time (let say after 24 hours) - without using a cronjob command from server or pl. How can you do this just us

Answer 1

After trying to use these examples, I hit a couple of issues:

1. The comparison operator should be greater than, not less than
2. filemtime returns the modified time. filectime is the time when a file's inode data is changed; that is, when the permissions, owner, group, or other metadata from the inode is updated, which may lead to unexpected results

I changed the example to use filemtime and fixed the comparison as follows:

 86400) {  // 86400 = 60*60*24
          if (preg_match('/\.txt$/i', $file)) {
            unlink($path.'/'.$file);
          }
        }
    }
  }
?>