Servage Magazine

Sometimes you just stumble over very useful code snippets and want to share them… Like with this one: Very useful piece of PHP code to scan directories, and find files within them – including files that start with a dot. The regular functions in PHP to scan directories etc. ommit those kinds of files, so this function below creates a wrapper and performs and extra search for dot-files.

/**
 * find files matching a pattern
 * using PHP "glob" function and recursion
 *
 * @return array containing all pattern-matched files
 *
 * @param string $dir     - directory to start with
 * @param string $pattern - pattern to glob for
 */
function find($dir, $pattern){
    // escape any character in a string that might be used to trick
    // a shell command into executing arbitrary commands
    $dir = escapeshellcmd($dir);
    // get a list of all matching files in the current directory
    $files = glob("$dir/$pattern");
    // find a list of all directories in the current directory
    // directories beginning with a dot are also included
    foreach (glob("$dir/{.[^.]*,*}", GLOB_BRACE|GLOB_ONLYDIR) as $sub_dir){
        $arr   = find($sub_dir, $pattern);  // resursive call
        $files = array_merge($files, $arr); // merge array with files from subdirectory
    }
    // return all found files
    return $files;
}

There is even a version using the Unix find command instead of PHP functions:

/**
 * find files matching a pattern
 * using unix "find" command
 *
 * @return array containing all pattern-matched files
 *
 * @param string $dir     - directory to start with
 * @param string $pattern - pattern to search
 */
function find($dir, $pattern){
    // escape any character in a string that might be used to trick
    // a shell command into executing arbitrary commands
    $dir = escapeshellcmd($dir);
    // execute "find" and return string with found files
    $files = shell_exec("find $dir -name '$pattern' -print");
    // create array from the returned string (trim will strip the last newline)
    $files = explode("\n", trim($files));
    // return array
    return $files;
}