Jim Moseby wrote:
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.
amen.
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
er??? stick the following in a file (localfiles.php):
<?php
function readDirWin($dir) {
$d = dir($dir);
while (false !== ($entry = $d->read())) {
if($entry!="." && $entry!="..") {
echo ($entry = $dir."\\".$entry), "\n";
if(is_dir($entry)) {
readDirWin($entry);
}
}
}
$d->close();
}
var_dump( readDirWin("C:") );
?>
and call it like so:
C:\path\to\your\CLI\php.exe C:\path\to\your\localfiles.php
technology, like Java, for that.
STOP RIGHT THERE - php might have been designed for spitting out webpages
and the like but these days you can run it as a general purpose scripting
language in all sorts of situations - including running a CLI version on
your windows desktop machine.
go here and install - not only will you have a CLI version of php
to play with - it will try to setup a webserver SAPI for whatever
webserver you have installed locally (within reason - personally
i only use Apache)
you can have a php script inspect your local machine by running
locally and stick its results in a database that lives on a machine
on the otherside of the world.
QUESTIONS:
1. what is the local machine?
2. where does the DB live? (is it a different machine?)
3. do you need reporting/information about the local machine
inspection anywhere other than the local machine?
4. will there be more than one local machine?
5. why do you want to do this?
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.
windows also has a task scheduler ... how good it is I don't really know
Also I would suggest that it would be better for the local machine to
push data to a server than for the server to pull data from the
local machine.
JM
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