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 performancewise 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 J 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().
