How to determine file age using PHP?
You are looking for the filemtime function
<?php
// outputs e.g. somefile.txt was last modified: December 29 2002 22:16:23.
$filename = 'somefile.txt';
if (file_exists($filename)) {
echo "$filename was last modified: " . date ("F d Y H:i:s.", filemtime($filename));
}
?>
I digged a bit on the web and Stackoverflow (PHP How to find the time elapsed since a date time?) and here is my solution:
It's a full answer giving a human readable representation of file age + a check to see if the file is 2 hours old or not.
<?php
function humanTiming ($time)
{
// to get the time since that moment
$time = time() - $time;
// time unit constants
$timeUnits = array (
31536000 => 'year',
2592000 => 'month',
604800 => 'week',
86400 => 'day',
3600 => 'hour',
60 => 'minute',
1 => 'second'
);
// iterate over time contants to build a human
$humanTiming;
foreach ($timeUnits as $unit => $text)
{
if ($time < $unit)
continue;
$numberOfUnits = floor($time / $unit);
// human readable token for current time unit
$humanTiming = $humanTiming.' '.$numberOfUnits.' '.$text.(($numberOfUnits>1)?'s':'');
// compute remaining time for next loop iteration
$time -= $unit*$numberOfUnits;
}
return $humanTiming;
}
$filename = '/path/to/your/file.extension';
if (file_exists($filename))
{
echo 'Now = '.date ("Y-m-d H:i:s.", time());
echo "<br/>$filename was last modified on " . date ("Y-m-d H:i:s.", filemtime($filename));
$time = strtotime('2010-04-28 17:25:43');
$time = filemtime($filename);
echo '<br/>File age is '.humanTiming($time).'.';
$fileAge = time()-filemtime($filename);
echo '<br/>Is file older than 2 hours? '.(($fileAge < (2*3600))?'No':'Yes').'.';
}
?>
Here is the output on my side:
Now = 2013-01-29 09:10:12.
/path/to/your/file.extension was last modified on 2013-01-29 08:07:52.
File age is 1 hour 2 minutes 20 seconds.
Is file older than 2 hours? No.
if (time()-filemtime($filename) > 2 * 3600) {
// file older than 2 hours
} else {
// file younger than 2 hours
}
You can use filemtime function to get the last modified date/time and use that to see how old the file is.