Sorting files by creation/modification date in PHP [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can store the files in an array, where the key is the filename and the value is the value to sort by (i.e. creation date) and use asort() on that array.

$files = array(
    'file1.txt' => 1267012304,
    'file3.txt' => 1267011892,
    'file2.txt' => 1266971321,
);
asort($files);
var_dump(array_keys($files));
# Output:
array(3) {
  [0]=>
  string(9) "file2.txt"
  [1]=>
  string(9) "file3.txt"
  [2]=>
  string(9) "file1.txt"
}

Answer 2

You could use scandir() to read the contents of the directory into an array, then use fileatime() or filectime() to see each file's access or creation time, respectively. Sorting the array from here shouldn't be too hard.

Answer 3

save their information to an array, sort the array and then loop the array

if($h = opendir($dir)) {
  $files = array();
  while(($file = readdir($h) !== FALSE)
    $files[] = stat($file);

  // do the sort
  usort($files, 'your_sorting_function');

  // do something with the files
  foreach($files as $file) {
    echo htmlspecialchars($file);
  }
}

Answer 4

use shell_exec to execute command on os-level? on a linux/unix box this might work;

$output=shell_exec('ls -t1');

Answer 5

That's my solution:

$fileList = array();
$files = glob('home/dir/*.txt');
foreach ($files as $file) {
    $fileList[filemtime($file)] = $file;
}
ksort($fileList);
$fileList = array_reverse($fileList, TRUE);
print_r($filelist);

output is like this:

array(
    (int) 1340625301 => '/home/dir/file15462.txt',
    (int) 1340516112 => '/home/dir/file165567.txt',
    (int) 1340401114 => '/home/dir/file16767.txt'
)

Then with "foreach" loop take the file you need.

Answer 6

Heh, not even the great DirectoryIterator can do that out of the box. Sigh.

There seems to be a pretty powerful script to do all that referenced here: preg_find. I've never worked with it but it looks good.

sorted in by filesize, in descending order?
$files = preg_find('/./', $dir,
  PREG_FIND_RECURSIVE| PREG_FIND_RETURNASSOC |
  PREG_FIND_SORTFILESIZE|PREG_FIND_SORTDESC);

$files=array_keys($files);