PHP: fileatime

Description

int fileatime ( string filename )

Returns the time the file was last accessed, or FALSE in case of an error. The time is returned as a Unix timestamp.

Note: The atime of a file is supposed to change whenever the data blocks of a file are being read. This can be costly performance-wise when an application regularly accesses a very large number of files or directories. Some Unix filesystems can be mounted with atime updates disabled to increase the performance of such applications; USENET news spools are a common example. On such filesystems this function will be useless.

Note: The results of this function are cached. See clearstatcache() for more details.

Tip: As of PHP 5.0.0 this function can also be used with some URL wrappers. Refer to Appendix L for a listing of which wrappers support stat() family of functionality.

Example 1. fileatime() example

<?php // outputs e.g. somefile.txt was last accessed: December 29 2002 22:16:23. $filename = 'somefile.txt'; if (file_exists($filename)) { echo "$filename was last accessed: " . date("F d Y H:i:s.", fileatime($filename)); } ?>

See also filemtime(), fileinode(), and date().

User Contributed Notes
fileatime

Maulwurf
10-Oct-2004 11:12


Using this function on Win98 made me grow grey hair.

Win 98 doesn't save the time for the last access. It only saves the date. This way, the returned timestamp from fileatime(file) is always much too small.



this command will always return false:



if($now - $last_access >1800) {

do something

}



using filemtime() instead did the thing.