scandir() to sort by date modified

Question

I'm trying to make scandir(); function go beyond its written limits, I need more than the alpha sorting it currently supports. I need to sort the scandir(); results to be sorted by modification date.

I've tried a few solutions I found here and some other solutions from different websites, but none worked for me, so I think it's reasonable for me to post here.

What I've tried so far is this:

function scan_dir($dir)
{
    $files_array = scandir($dir);
    $img_array   = array();
    $img_dsort   = array();
    $final_array = array();

    foreach($files_array as $file)
    {
        if(($file != ".") && ($file != "..") && ($file != ".svn") && ($file != ".htaccess"))
        {
            $img_array[] = $file;
            $img_dsort[] = filemtime($dir . '/' . $file);   
        }
    }

    $merge_arrays = array_combine($img_dsort, $img_array);
    krsort($merge_arrays);

    foreach($merge_arrays as $key => $value)
    {
        $final_array[] = $value;    
    }

    return (is_array($final_array)) ? $final_array : false;
}

But, this doesn't seem to work for me, it returns 3 results only, but it should return 16 results, because there are 16 images in the folder.

Answer 1

function scan_dir($dir) {
    $ignored = array('.', '..', '.svn', '.htaccess');

    $files = array();    
    foreach (scandir($dir) as $file) {
        if (in_array($file, $ignored)) continue;
        $files[$file] = filemtime($dir . '/' . $file);
    }

    arsort($files);
    $files = array_keys($files);

    return ($files) ? $files : false;
}

Answer 2

This is a great question and Ryon Sherman’s answer provides a solid answer, but I needed a bit more flexibility for my needs so I created this newer function: better_scandir.

The goal is to allow having scandir sorting order flags work as expected; not just the reverse array sort method in Ryon’s answer. And also explicitly setting SORT_NUMERIC for the array sort since those time values are clearly numbers.

Usage is like this; just switch out SCANDIR_SORT_DESCENDING to SCANDIR_SORT_ASCENDING or even leave it empty for default:

better_scandir(<filepath goes here>, SCANDIR_SORT_DESCENDING);

And here is the function itself:

function better_scandir($dir, $sorting_order = SCANDIR_SORT_ASCENDING) {

  /****************************************************************************/
  // Roll through the scandir values.
  $files = array();
  foreach (scandir($dir, $sorting_order) as $file) {
    if ($file[0] === '.') {
      continue;
    }
    $files[$file] = filemtime($dir . '/' . $file);
  } // foreach

  /****************************************************************************/
  // Sort the files array.
  if ($sorting_order == SCANDIR_SORT_ASCENDING) {
    asort($files, SORT_NUMERIC);
  }
  else {
    arsort($files, SORT_NUMERIC);
  }

  /****************************************************************************/
  // Set the final return value.
  $ret = array_keys($files);

  /****************************************************************************/
  // Return the final value.
  return ($ret) ? $ret : false;

} // better_scandir

Answer 3

Alternative example..

$dir = "/home/novayear/public_html/backups";
chdir($dir);
array_multisort(array_map('filemtime', ($files = glob("*.{sql,php,7z}", GLOB_BRACE))), SORT_DESC, $files);
foreach($files as $filename)
{
  echo "<a>".substr($filename, 0, -4)."</a><br>"; 
}