PHP: What is the best and easiest way to check if directory is empty or not [closed]

Question

I got a root directory with 100s of dynamically generated folders. As time goes some of these folders will need to be extirpated from system on the condition that this(ese) directories(s) must be empty. What would be the best shortest, easiest and/or most effective way to achieve that?

Neap

rmdir will fail for non-empty directory, so just $deleted = @rmdir('/path/to/folder'); – Utility

Thanks... going the glob way as suggested by both @Matteo and Jeffman – Neap

Answer 1

Use glob :

if (count(glob("path/*")) === 0 ) { // empty

A nice thing about glob is that it doesn't return . and .. directories.

Jorin

use GLOB_NOSORT flag to increase performance – Brelje

but if ./.. are not reported, then such dir would not be deleted, as it is not empty ... so it seems to be not good for empty dir removal – Mcgaha

This wrong way, glob() ignores hidden files by default, php.net/manual/ru/function.glob.php#68869 So, if you add the mask to get hidden files in glob() you've got the same solution, as @Matteo wrote below. – Eagre

Considering coding convenience this is efficient. Considering performance this may be bad if glob first need to deliver +1000 files for each dir to check after which count tells how many files there are. – Xylol

Answer 2

You can count the items contained in the folder. The first two items are . and .., so just check the items count.

$files_in_directory = scandir('path/to');
$items_count = count($files_in_directory);
if ($items_count <= 2)
{
    $empty = true;
}
else {
    $empty = false;
}

Buckie

Is this going to be quicker and most effective way than the glob suggested by @jeffman ? – Neap

I benchmarked the two solutions and actually Jeffman one's is faster (on one folder). Jeffman: 5.388E-5 seconds My solution: 2.909E-5 seconds – Buckie

+1...for elaborating further. Thanks – Neap