readdir() way of reading

[Fking]

What's the consequence of reading a dir with this function.
On my unix server i noticeted that the array it creates, is with the oldest sub-directories as first elements and the newest one at the end of the array. So it reads the dir by file date.
The question is, does the way of reading depends on the system or this function always works like that.

Also how i can make it to work the opposite way?
Thanks.

[bradgrafelman]

To quote the manual for [man]readdir/man:

The filenames are returned in the order in which they are stored by the filesystem.

So yes, it's filesystem-dependent.

Now, if you want to do some sorting, such as alphabetical order, you could try something like [man]ksort/man.

[Fking]

bradgrafelman wrote:

To quote the manual for [man]readdir/man:

So yes, it's filesystem-dependent.

Now, if you want to do some sorting, such as alphabetical order, you could try something like [man]ksort/man.

thanks
I'm alphabetically sorting it now, but i want to sort it by date, from the newest to the oldest...?

[bradgrafelman]

function get_file_list($path) {
	$dir = opendir($path);
	$list = array();

while (false !== ($file = readdir($dir)))
	if($file != '.' && $file != '..')
		$files[] = $file;

closedir($dir);

foreach($files as $filename)
	$list[$filename] = filemtime($path . $filename);

return arsort($list);
}

Returns an array like so:

Array
(
    [[b]filename[/b]] => [b]UNIX timestamp of file's last modification[/b]
    ...
)