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# fileatime

(PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5)

fileatime -- Gets last access time of file

## Description

int fileatime ( string filename )

Returns the time the file was last accessed, or `FALSE` in case of an error. The time is returned as a Unix timestamp.

Note: The atime of a file is supposed to change whenever the data blocks of a file are being read. This can be costly performance-wise when an application regularly accesses a very large number of files or directories. Some Unix filesystems can be mounted with atime updates disabled to increase the performance of such applications; USENET news spools are a common example. On such filesystems this function will be useless.

> Note: The results of this function are cached. See clearstatcache() for more details.

> Tip: As of PHP 5.0.0 this function can also be used with some URL wrappers. Refer to Appendix M for a listing of which wrappers support stat() family of functionality.

Example 1. fileatime() example

`<?php // outputs e.g. somefile.txt was last accessed: December 29 2002 22:16:23. $filename = 'somefile.txt'; if (file_exists($filename)) { echo "$filename was last accessed: " . date("F d Y H:i:s.", fileatime($filename)); } ?>`

See also filemtime(), fileinode(), and date().

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