Find difference between now and a file's last change time in PHP

Question

I have a file called "file.txt". I get its last change time with this:

$lastTime = filemtime("file.txt");

Then I make

$lastDate = date("Y-m-d",strtotime( $lastTime ));
$todaysDate = date("Y-m-d",strtotime('now'));

Then I substract lastDate from todaysDate and find the difference. Is there a quicker way to do this?

I don't want to check whether the difference of seconds is >= 86400 or not.

For example the difference between these two dates must be "1".

2013-03-31 10:00
2013-03-30 19:00

If i check for the difference of seconds I will have 54K seconds, which is smaller than 86400 seconds.

Answer 1

Get the difference in seconds, then convert to days and round the result.

$diff = time()-filemtime("file.txt");
$days = round($diff/86400);

You could also use floor or ceil in place of round depending on exactly how you want to handle partial days.