Question

i want to create a php script who erase all the photo in one folder but not the last five of them, i dont know if in php is possible to know the date of creation of a file, i really dont know how to do this, thanks!

Answer 1

You can get the last modified time of a file using filemtime. You mentioned the creation date; On a Windows system you can get the creation time using filectime however on a Unix based system this will just get the changed time since Unix systems don’t store the creation date of a file.

Once you have this info, a basic technique would be to just loop over each file in the folder grabbing their modification times, then delete all but the ones with the 5 latest times.

A quick example, although there’s probably a much more succinct way of doing this,

if ($handle = opendir('/path/to/your/folder')) 
{
    $files = array();
    while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) 
    {
        if (!is_dir($file))
        {
            // You'll want to check the return value here rather than just blindly adding to the array
            $files[$file] = filemtime($file);
        }
    }

    // Now sort by timestamp (just an integer) from oldest to newest
    asort($files, SORT_NUMERIC);

    // Loop over all but the 5 newest files and delete them
    // Only need the array keys (filenames) since we don't care about timestamps now as the array will be in order
    $files = array_keys($files);
    for ($i = 0; $i < (count($files) - 5); $i++)
    {
        // You'll probably want to check the return value of this too
        unlink($files[$i]);
    }
}