filectime

This method gets all the files in a directory, and echoes them in the order of the date they were added (by ftp or whatever).<?PHPfunction dirList ($directory, $sortOrder){    //Get each file and add its details to two arrays    $results = array();    $handler = opendir($directory);    while ($file = readdir($handler)) {          if ($file != '.' && $file != '..' && $file != "robots.txt" && $file != ".htaccess"){            $currentModified = filectime($directory."/".$file);            $file_names[] = $file;            $file_dates[] = $currentModified;        }        }       closedir($handler);    //Sort the date array by preferred order    if ($sortOrder == "newestFirst"){        arsort($file_dates);    }else{        asort($file_dates);    }        //Match file_names array to file_dates array    $file_names_Array = array_keys($file_dates);    foreach ($file_names_Array as $idx => $name) $name=$file_names[$name];    $file_dates = array_merge($file_dates);        $i = 0;    //Loop through dates array and then echo the list    foreach ($file_dates as $file_dates){        $date = $file_dates;        $j = $file_names_Array[$i];        $file = $file_names[$j];        $i++;                    echo  "File name: $file - Date Added: $date. <br/>"";            }}?>I hope this is useful to somebody.

If you need file creation time on Mac OS X:<?phpif ($handle = popen('stat -f %B ' . escapeshellarg($filename), 'r')) {    $btime = trim(fread($handle, 100));    echo strftime("btime: %Y.%m.%d %H:%M:%S\n", $btime);    pclose($handle);}?>

Filemtime seems to return the date of the EARLIEST modified file inside a folder, so this is a recursive function to return the date of the LAST (most recently) modified file inside a folder.<?php// Only take into account those files whose extensions you want to show.$allowedExtensions = array(  'zip',  'rar',  'pdf',  'txt');function filemtime_r($path){    global $allowedExtensions;        if (!file_exists($path))        return 0;        $extension = end(explode(".", $path));         if (is_file($path) && in_array($extension, $allowedExtensions))        return filemtime($path);    $ret = 0;         foreach (glob($path."/*") as $fn)     {        if (filemtime_r($fn) > $ret)            $ret = filemtime_r($fn);                // This will return a timestamp, you will have to use date().     }    return $ret;    }?>

You should avoid feeding the function files without a path. This applies for filemtime() and possibly fileatime() as well. If you omit the path the command will fail with the warning "filectime(): stat failed for filename.php".

Line 37 of the code above has an error.echo  "File name: $file - Date Added: $date. <br/>"";  There is an extra "  after the <br/> that needs to be deleted in order for this code to work.

Under Windows you can use fileatime() instead of filectime().

Note that on Windows systems, filectime will show the file creation time, as there is no such thing as "change time" in Windows.

filectime running on windows reading a file from a samba share, will still show the last modified date.

If you use filectime with a symbolic link, you will get the change time of the file actually linked to. To get informations about the link self, use lstat.