CGI script to list files within a directory

Now for the next problem - what should the PHP script do actually? Well, it'll have to begin by finding out which HTML files exist - it has to be able to find the files before it can analyse them. While searching the web for information about invoking PHP scripts using crontab I happened to come across >>this tutorial page which gives the following as an example of a shell script:

#!/bin/sh rm -f /tmp/listing.tmp> /dev/null 2>&1 touch /tmp/listing.tmp ls -l [a-z]*.doc | sort> /tmp/listing.tmp lpr -Ppostscript_1 /tmp/listing.tmp rm -f /tmp/listing.tmp

 
This gave me the idea that I could perhaps use a similar script to produce a text file listing the files within a directory, ready for analysing by the Expiry Checker PHP script.

expirychecker.cgi

I tried this cgi script...

#!/bin/sh # # Test script just to create a list of files # # author = Martin Bush, South Bank University # date = 9th August 2002 # version = 1.1 # history = - # touch it first to create it if it doesn't exist touch file-list.txt # now pipe a list of the files within the directory to it ls > file-list.txt # for some reason it crashes without an echo like this... echo Content-Type: text/plain echo echo The date and time at this server is `date` # ...but I don't understand why!

 
...which worked. The URL required to invoking cgi scripts (on the SBU Unix system at least) is a little different from the URL for PHP scripts. In this case the cgi script is triggered by this URL:

http://www.sbu.ac.uk/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~bushm/expirychecker.cgi

So far so good, although this isn't the whole story - because the Expiry Checker will have to analyse all the files not just in one directory but also in all the sub-directories of that directory. If the directory structure was fixed it would be probably be easier, but given that we'll sometimes need to create new sub-directories or delete old ones I really need to create a script that is able to find all the sub-directories, and then the files within them, by itself. Right now I can't think of a way to do that!