Question

How would one go about deleting all of the directories in a directory tree that have a certain name if the only access to the server available is via FTP?

To clarify, I would like to iterate over a directory tree and delete every directory whose name matches a certain string via FTP. A way to implement this in PHP would be nice – where should I start? Also, if anyone knows of any utilities that would already do this, that would be great as well.

Answer 1

Here is a starting point- a function that will scan through an FTP directory and print the name of any directory in the tree which matches the pattern. I have tested it briefly.

function scan_ftp_dir($conn, $dir, $pattern) {     $files = ftp_nlist($conn, $dir);     if (!$files) {         return;     }      foreach ($files as $file) {         //the quickest way i can think of to check if is a directory         if (ftp_size($conn, $file) == -1) {              //get just the directory name             $dirName = substr($file, strrpos($file, '/') + 1);              if (preg_match($pattern, $dirName)) {                 echo $file . ' matched pattern';             } else {                         //directory didn't match pattern, recurse                    scan_ftp_dir($conn, $file, $pattern);             }         }      } } 

Then do something like this

$host = 'localhost'; $user = 'user'; $pass = 'pass';   if (false === ($conn = ftp_connect($host))) {     die ('cannot connect'); }  if (!ftp_login($conn, $user, $pass)) die ('cannot authenticate');   scan_ftp_dir($conn, '.', '/^beginswith/'); 

Unfortunately you can only delete an empty directory with ftp_rmdir(), but if you look here there is a function called ftp_rmAll() which you could use to remove whole directory structures which you find.

Also I have only tested on Unix the trick of using the fail status returned from ftp_size() as a method of checking if an item returned by ftp_nlist() is a directory.