php glob - scan in subfolders for a file

There are 2 ways.

Use glob to do recursive search:

<?php // Does not support flag GLOB_BRACEfunction rglob($pattern, $flags = 0) {    $files = glob($pattern, $flags);     foreach (glob(dirname($pattern).'/*', GLOB_ONLYDIR|GLOB_NOSORT) as $dir) {        $files = array_merge($files, rglob($dir.'/'.basename($pattern), $flags));    }    return $files;}// usage: to find the test.zip file recursively$result = rglob($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/test.zip');var_dump($result);// to find the all files that names ends with test.zip$result = rglob($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/*test.zip');?>

Use RecursiveDirectoryIterator

<?php// $regPattern should be using regular expressionfunction rsearch($folder, $regPattern) {    $dir = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($folder);    $ite = new RecursiveIteratorIterator($dir);    $files = new RegexIterator($ite, $regPattern, RegexIterator::GET_MATCH);    $fileList = array();    foreach($files as $file) {        $fileList = array_merge($fileList, $file);    }    return $fileList;}// usage: to find the test.zip file recursively$result = rsearch($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'], '/.*\/test\.zip/'));var_dump($result);?>

RecursiveDirectoryIterator comes with PHP5 while glob is from PHP4. Both can do the job, it's up to you.

I want to provide another simple alternative for cases where you can predict a max depth. You can use a pattern with braces listing all possible subfolder depths.

This example allows 0-3 arbitrary subfolders:

glob("$root/{,*/,*/*/,*/*/*/}test_*.zip", GLOB_BRACE);

Of course the braced pattern could be procedurally generated.

This returns fullpath to the file

function rsearch($folder, $pattern) {    $iti = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($folder);    foreach(new RecursiveIteratorIterator($iti) as $file){         if(strpos($file , $pattern) !== false){            return $file;         }    }    return false;}

call the function:

$filepath = rsearch('/home/directory/thisdir/', "/findthisfile.jpg");

And this is returns like:

/home/directory/thisdir/subdir/findthisfile.jpg

You can improve this function to find several files like all jpeg file:

function rsearch($folder, $pattern_array) {    $return = array();    $iti = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator($folder);    foreach(new RecursiveIteratorIterator($iti) as $file){        if (in_array(strtolower(array_pop(explode('.', $file))), $pattern_array)){            $return[] = $file;        }    }    return $return;}

This can call as:

$filepaths = rsearch('/home/directory/thisdir/', array('jpeg', 'jpg') );

Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1860417/219112