Changes

Now that we have spent some time looking at how to work with files in PHP (see [[PHP, Filesystems and File I/O]]) it is now time to look at how to work with file system directories. PHP provides a number of functions that can be used to perform tasks such as identifying and changing the current directory, creating new directories, deleting existing directories and list listing the contents of a directory.

A new directory can be created in PHP using the ''mkdir()'' function. This function takes a path to the directory to be created. To create a directory in the same directory as your PHP script simply provide the directory name. To create a new directory in a different directory specify the full path when calling ''mkdir()''.

It is unlikely that a web application will be able to perform all of its file related tasks in a single directory. For this reason, it is vital to be able to both find out the current working directory, and change to another directory from within a PHP striptscript.