Question

How can i use opendir function to read the directory list of a remote server knowing its IP address?

Answer 1

Assuming you are trying to access the remote server using HTTP, you won’t be able to do this directly. Since HTTP is really going access the web service of your remote server, it controls how the files are presented to you. In the case of many web servers, you can turn on “indexes” for folder contents. This causes the entries in the folder to be displayed in your browser as HTML. In order to traverse the directory structure, you would need to parse this HTML to find the path information.

If you are using FTP, you can pass the ftp://... URL to opendir() as of version 5.0. Note that this capability can be turned off by your server admin. If you cannot use this feature directly, see the FTP functions manual for PHP (including ftp_nlist() for listing files).

An example from the above references:

<?php

// set up basic connection
$conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server);

// login with username and password
$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);

// get contents of the current directory
$contents = ftp_nlist($conn_id, ".");

// output $contents
var_dump($contents);

?>