How to check if directory contents has changed with PHP?

Asked 2009-02-12T07:04:27.210

I'm writing a photo gallery script in PHP and have a single directory where the user will store their pictures. I'm attempting to set up page caching and have the cache refresh only if the contents of the directory has changed. I thought I could do this by caching the last modified time of the directory using the filemtime() function and compare it to the current modified time of the directory. However, as I've come to realize, the directory modified time does not change as files are added or removed from that directory (at least on Windows, not sure about Linux machines yet).

So my questions is, what is the simplest way to check if the contents of a directory have been modified?

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3 Answers

What about touching the directory after a user has submitted his image? Changelog says: Requires php 5.3 for windows to work, but I think it should work on all other environments

answered 2009-02-12T10:25:00.410

You're thinking the wrong way.

You should execute your directory indexer script as soon as someone's uploaded a new file and it's moved to the target location.

answered 2009-02-12T08:10:35.600

I was looking for something similar and I just found this:

http://www.franzone.com/2008/06/05/php-script-to-monitor-ftp-directory-changes/

For me looks like a great solution since I'll have a lot of control (I'll be doing an AJAX call to see if anything changed).

Hope that this helps.

answered 2009-12-13T09:01:46.267

How to check if directory contents has changed with PHP?

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