On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to work with files and directories through your PHP applications.

In this article I’ll talk about a common task you might have experienced while developing a PHP application: listing files and directories. I’ll discuss several basic and advanced solutions, each having its pros and cons. First I’ll present three approaches that use some very basic PHP functions and then progress to more robust ones which make use of SPL Iterators.

The solutions they look at are the built-in functions like glob and readdir/opendir as well as SPL iterators up for the task - FilesystemIterator, RecursiveDirectoryIterator and GlobIterator. Code samples are included in the post, showing how to use each method to get and list the files. A few helpful hints are also included to finish off the tutorial (mostly about "tricks" to using the functions effectively).