This method gets all the files in a directory, and echoes them in the order of the date they were added (by ftp or whatever).

<?PHP
function dirList ($directory, $sortOrder){

    //Get each file and add its details to two arrays
    $results = array();
    $handler = opendir($directory);
    while ($file = readdir($handler)) {  
        if ($file != '.' && $file != '..' && $file != "robots.txt" && $file != ".htaccess"){
            $currentModified = filectime($directory."/".$file);
            $file_names[] = $file;
            $file_dates[] = $currentModified;
        }    
    }
       closedir($handler);

    //Sort the date array by preferred order
    if ($sortOrder == "newestFirst"){
        arsort($file_dates);
    }else{
        asort($file_dates);
    }
    
    //Match file_names array to file_dates array
    $file_names_Array = array_keys($file_dates);
    foreach ($file_names_Array as $idx => $name) $name=$file_names[$name];
    $file_dates = array_merge($file_dates);
    
    $i = 0;

    //Loop through dates array and then echo the list
    foreach ($file_dates as $file_dates){
        $date = $file_dates;
        $j = $file_names_Array[$i];
        $file = $file_names[$j];
        $i++;
            
        echo  "File name: $file - Date Added: $date. <br/>"";        
    }

}
?>

I hope this is useful to somebody.

Line 37 of the code above has an error.

echo  "File name: $file - Date Added: $date. <br/>"";  

There is an extra "  after the <br/> that needs to be deleted in order for this code to work.

Filemtime seems to return the date of the EARLIEST modified file inside a folder, so this is a recursive function to return the date of the LAST (most recently) modified file inside a folder.

<?php

// Only take into account those files whose extensions you want to show.
$allowedExtensions = array(
  'zip',
  'rar',
  'pdf',
  'txt'
);

function filemtime_r($path)
{
    global $allowedExtensions;
    
    if (!file_exists($path))
        return 0;
    
    $extension = end(explode(".", $path));     
    if (is_file($path) && in_array($extension, $allowedExtensions))
        return filemtime($path);
    $ret = 0;
    
     foreach (glob($path."/*") as $fn)
     {
        if (filemtime_r($fn) > $ret)
            $ret = filemtime_r($fn);    
            // This will return a timestamp, you will have to use date().
     }
    return $ret;    
}

?>

You should avoid feeding the function files without a path. This applies for filemtime() and possibly fileatime() as well. If you omit the path the command will fail with the warning "filectime(): stat failed for filename.php".

Under Windows you can use fileatime() instead of filectime().

filectime running on windows reading a file from a samba share, will still show the last modified date.

If you need file creation time on Mac OS X:

<?php
if ($handle = popen('stat -f %B ' . escapeshellarg($filename), 'r')) {
    $btime = trim(fread($handle, 100));
    echo strftime("btime: %Y.%m.%d %H:%M:%S\n", $btime);
    pclose($handle);
}
?>

Note that on Windows systems, filectime will show the file creation time, as there is no such thing as "change time" in Windows.

If you use filectime with a symbolic link, you will get the change time of the file actually linked to. To get informations about the link self, use lstat.