compare file system to database

dkrysak

Ok, I am writing a report in which i am looking for "orphaned" files in my file system. And by orphaned, I mean that they do not have a corresponding record in a database.

Now i have been running over ideas on how to accomplish this, and one of the things I was thinking about doing (But i think it would be WAY to resource intensive) was grabbing a directory listing in an array of objects, then looping through that and doing a SQL query..... but that potentially could be really resource intensive.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

scrupul0us

well... either way its going to be resource intensive

youll have todo a recursive directory crawl (if you need sub dir's) or a standard single crawl and for every file look for it in the DB...

having proper indexes on the DB tables will help speed things up slightly

dkrysak

ok, so no matter which way I do it, it will be a bit of a hog.

Maybe a cron'd php file that runs at night might be a better option. With a report out.

bpat1434

Not necessarily. If you're storing the paths and filenames in the database, then you can easily just [man]glob/man for all the files on your system in specific directories, and then you can do a simple SQL query to get the directory/path info and the corresponding filename. Then all you'd have to do is to loop over the results and a quick [man]in_array/man of the proper array would let you know if you should [man]unlink/man the file or not.

It doesn't have to resource intensive if you don't make it. And a good way to prevent this is to delete files when you remove them from the database, and only allow one entry in the database per file on the system.