Question

Basically I have a php script that lists all the files in a directory and creates links to them. However it seems to order the files in a very arbitrary fashion (not according alphabetically/by date/ by size etc…). What way does php order the files? Is there any way to change this?

 <?php
    $orig = "/var/www/phplist";
    if ($dir = opendir($orig)) {
        echo "from: $orig";
        echo "<br><br>";

        while ($file = readdir($dir)) {
        $ok = "true";
        $filename = $file;
        if ($file == "."){
        $ok = "false";
        }
        else if ($file == ".."){
        $ok = "false";
        }
        if ($ok == "true"){
          echo "<a href= '/phplist/$file'>$filename</a>";
        echo "<br>";
        }
        }

        closedir($dir);
    }
    ?> 

Answer 1

The documentation for this function explains what you’re looking for:

Returns the name of the next entry in the directory. The entries are
returned in the order in which they are stored by the filesystem.

And depending on the filesystem, the files might retain the order in which they were created (FAT); might be sorted alphabetically (NTFS); might be sorted according to their position in a hash table (ext4); or various other ways.

If you need files in a specific order look at scandir which takes a parameter that specifies the sort order.