Hi Jon, welcome. > I'm really new at PHP and will probably embarrass myself > many times over asking questions that have been asked > gazillions of times before, so let this serve as a blanket apology. You will get a cold response from the regulars on this list if you "ask questions that have been asked gazillions of times before". Friendly advice: always take a little time to search the archives of this list and google a bit to see if your question has already been answered. Can you imagine what this list would be like if every newbie asked the same questions every day? That said, on to your questions. > I'm not really asking for anyone to write the code for > me, but I am looking for suggestions for PHP functions to use > to accomplish the inspection of my local computer's folders. > I'd also need to know what additional information I'd need to > store in the database so that subsequent updates can be > automated (i.e., do I need to somehow store my IP address?). You will not be able to do what you propose with a purely PHP solution. PHP is a server-side technology. That means all the processing is done at the server, then output to your browser. PHP, to my knowledge, has no way to inspect your computer's folders. You would need to look to a client-side technology, like Java, for that. However, you can upload data to your website using PHP to process the uploaded file. So, at your convienience, you can have a "Browse" button on an update page that will allow you to browse and find your data to upload. After the upload you can have PHP process the uploaded file any way you wish. You can also use cron to kick off scheduled tasks with PHP CLI scripts that will, for instance, open an FTP connection to your machine and download data files to the server for processing. JM -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
