File searching in a directory using php

Question

How i can list all the files in a folder and its sub folders using php

Answer 1

Are you talking about for a php script running as its own program or a web application. Why would you need to do this?

echo shell_exec('find -name *');

But then you can really just run that in the shell.

If you want a web application to run this, www-data will need permissions to run that script and it is highly unsafe to let it do that. Instead you can have a user with appropriate permission log in and do that. Not quite as unsafe.

Answer 2

You can write a script to get all files in a folder(and subfolders) using php scandir in an array. Then you can search that array for your particular file.

Example:

<?php
    $dir    = '/tmp';
    $files = scandir($dir);
    print_r($files); 
?>

Output something like this:

Array
(
    [0] => .
    [1] => ..
    [2] => bar.php
    [3] => foo.txt
    [4] => somedir
)

Answer 3

You can make use of the SPL iterators. In particular the RecursiveDirectoryIterator which will recursively traverse through a given directory structure.

Like so:

$realpath = realpath('/path/to/file');


$fileObjects = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($realpath),
                 RecursiveIteratorIterator::SELF_FIRST);

foreach($fileObjects as $key => $object){
    if($object->getFilename() === 'filename.png') {
        echo $object->getPathname();
    }
}

The SELF_FIRST iteration mode basically tells the iterator that the parent items are to be placed first (parents come first).

Answer 4

If you want to be able to specify a mask or something, like *.txt for all txt files then there is no better function than "glob" :)