stat()

stat() — Gives information about a file.

Built-in function of PHP 8.5. The manual lists it as available in PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8. This page is the reference card: signature, parameters and return value, plus the changelog and the example the manual provides.

What it does

Gathers the statistics of the file named by filename. If filename is a symbolic link, statistics are from the file itself, not the symlink. Prior to PHP 7.4.0, on Windows NTS builds the size, atime, mtime and ctime statistics have been from the symlink, in this case.

Signature

stat(string $filename): array|false

Parameters

Parameter	Type	What it takes
$filename	string	Path to the file.

Return value

stat() and fstat() result format Numeric Associative Description 0 dev device number *** 1 ino inode number **** 2 mode inode protection mode ***** 3 nlink number of links 4 uid userid of owner * 5 gid groupid of owner * 6 rdev device type, if inode device 7 size size in bytes 8 atime time of last access (Unix timestamp) 9 mtime time of last modification (Unix timestamp) 10 ctime time of last inode change (Unix timestamp) 11 blksize blocksize of filesystem IO ** 12 blocks number of 512-byte blocks allocated ** * On Windows this will always be 0. ** Only valid on systems supporting the st_blksize type - other systems (e.g. Windows) return -1. *** On Windows, as of PHP 7.4.0, this is the ...

Example

A runnable snippet:

/* Get file stat */ $stat = stat('C:\php\php.exe'); /* * Print file access time, this is the same * as calling fileatime() */ echo 'Access time: ' . $stat['atime']; /* * Print file modification time, this is the * same as calling filemtime() */ echo 'Modification time: ' . $stat['mtime']; /* Print the device number */ echo 'Device number: ' . $stat['dev'];

Changelog

Version	Change
7.4.0	On Windows, the device number is now the serial number of the volume that contains the file, and the inode number is the identifier associated with the file.
7.4.0	The size, atime, mtime and ctime statistics of symlinks are always those of the target. This was previously not the case for NTS builds on Windows.