File system management is not the most common use case for PHP, but in writing a command line tool today I was surprised to find that PHP doesn’t have a function to recursively remove a directory (I was expecting at least a flag for rmdir or unlick, but no, nothing).
I did a quick Google search, just to be sure, and found numerous other people asking this same question and a few rather long winded recursive functional solutions floating around.
No being much of functional programming (and also because really there is no excuse for it when PHP has had reasonable OOP and some fantastic stuff in the SPL for a long time now) I knocked together a much cleaner SPL based solution for recursively deleting a directory:
{
$iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new \RecursiveDirectoryIterator($dir, \FilesystemIterator::SKIP_DOTS), \RecursiveIteratorIterator::CHILD_FIRST);
foreach ($iterator as $filename => $fileInfo) {
if ($fileInfo->isDir()) {
rmdir($filename);
} else {
unlink($filename);
}
}
}
I’ve obviously not added any checks to ensure that rmdir and unlink are successful, but this would be a simple addition and I really wanted to post this as an example of a nice modern way to use PHP rather than relying on old functional components.
