Re: Opening and reading director produces random order

On Dec 9, 2014, at 12:13 PM, Ashley Sheridan wrote:

On 9 December 2014 20:05:42 GMT+00:00, Jeffry Killen <jekillen@prodigy.netwrote:

Hello; I have the following section of code that opens and reads a dir and assembles the contents into html table markup: The question is: when this is run on my remote hosting service, the list comes out in a random order, Why and what can I do programatically to correct the order? The remote system is running on a Linux platform, but that shouldn't make a difference. I seem to remember somewhere in the php manual that the sort order may be random and that there was a function for producing a natural sort(?) (while at home in local dev server: Apache running on Mac OSX, the list comes out in the order it appears in the directory) Thank you for time and attention JK the code: @$_dr = opendir($_dir);

              if(!$_dr)
                {
                 $_stat = '';
                 if(!is_dir($_dir))
                   {
                    $_stat = 'not found';
                   }
                 else if(!is_readable($_dir))
                   {
                    $_stat = 'not readable';
                   }
                 $_out['error'] = "_CONSOLE->mkList() error: ".

$_dir." not opened for read: ".$_stat;

                 return $_out['error'];
                }
              $_itr = 0;
              $_out['mrkUp'] = "<table><tr><td><span class=\"norm

\">Owner</span></td><td><span class=\"norm\">type and permissions</ span></td><td><span class=\"norm\">Octal value</span></td><td><span class=\"norm\">Name</span></td></tr>\n";

              while(false !== ($_x = readdir($_dr)))
                {
                 $_owner = self::getOwner($_dir.$_x);
                 $_octPerms = substr(sprintf('%o', fileperms($_dir.

$_x)), -4);

                 $_out['mrkUp'] .= "<tr><td><span class=\"norm\" id=

\"o_".$_itr."\">".$_owner."</span></td><td><span class=\"norm\" id= \"p_".$_itr."\">".self::getWRXPerms($_dir.$_x)."</span></td><td><span class=\"norm\" id=\"r_".$_itr."\">".$_octPerms."</span></td><td><span class=\"norm\" id=\"n_".$_itr."\">".basename($_x)."</span></td></tr>\n";

                 $_itr++;
                }
              closedir($_dr);
              $_out['mrkUp'] .= "</table>";
              return $_out;

I believe the natural order of a directory listing on linux is by the internal inode number. It should be easy though to put the listing results into an array first and then sort that however you wish. Also, one thing you should always avoid is the use of @ to suppress errors. If you think your code will cause an error, code defensively, or at the least use exception handling. Thanks, Ash

Actually, I think I understand what you mean by code defensively: instead of this:

@$_dr = opendir($_dir);

              if(!$_dr)
                {
                 $_stat = '';
                 if(!is_dir($_dir))
                   {
                    $_stat = 'not found';
                   }
                 else if(!is_readable($_dir))
                   {
                    $_stat = 'not readable';
                   }
                 $_out['error'] = "_CONSOLE->mkList() error: ". $_dir." not opened for read: ".$_stat;
                 return $_out['error'];
                }

it should be this:

if(!$_dr)

                {
                 $_stat = '';
                 if(!is_dir($_dir))
                   {
                    $_stat = 'not found';
                   }
                 else if(!is_readable($_dir))
                   {
                    $_stat = 'not readable';
                   }
                 $_out['error'] = "_CONSOLE->mkList() error: ". $_dir." not opened for read: ".$_stat;
                 return $_out['error'];
                }

$_dr = opendir($_dir);

              if(!$_dr)
                {
                 $_stat = '';
                 if(!is_dir($_dir))
                   {
                    $_stat = 'not found';
                   }
                 else if(!is_readable($_dir))
                   {
                    $_stat = 'not readable';
                   }
                 $_out['error'] = "_CONSOLE->mkList() error: ".

$_dir." not opened for read: ".$_stat;

                 return $_out['error'];
                }