How to delete files from directory based on creation date in php?

Question

I have a cache folder that stores html files. They are overwritten when needed, but a lot of the time, rarely used pages are cached in there also, that just end up using space (after 5 weeks, the drive was full with over 2.7 million cache files).

Whats the best way to loop thru a directory that contains several hundreds of thousands of files, and remove files that are older than 1 day?

Answer 1

I think you could go about this by looping through the directory with readdir and delete based on the timestamp:

<?php
$path = '/path/to/files/';
if ($handle = opendir($path)) {

    while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) { 
        $filelastmodified = filemtime($path . $file);
        //24 hours in a day * 3600 seconds per hour
        if((time() - $filelastmodified) > 24*3600)
        {
           unlink($path . $file);
        }

    }

    closedir($handle); 
}
?>

The if((time() - $filelastmodified) > 24*3600) will select files older than 24 hours (24 hours times 3600 seconds per hour). If you wanted days, it should read for example 7*24*3600 for files older than a week.

Also, note that filemtime returns the time of last modification of the file, instead of creation date.