PHP: How can I grab a single file from a directory without scanning entire directory?

Question

I have a directory with 1.3 Million files that I need to move into a database. I just need to grab a single filename from the directory WITHOUT scanning the whole directory.

Answer 1

readdir will do the trick. Check the exampl on that page but instead of doing the readdir call in the loop, just do it once. You'll get the first file in the directory.

Note: you might get ".", "..", and other similar responses depending on the server, so you might want to at least loop until you get a valid file.