Following our tutorials on uploading files and listing files, this tutorial will walk you through deleting files from a directory. This is done using the unlink() function.

To start off, we create a function and pull through the file we’re going to delete.

function file_delete($file) {

}

Then, we need to make sure that the file we’re trying to delete isn’t currently open. Confusing, we also have to make sure it’s open before we do this!

function file_delete($file) {

$ofile = fopen($file, ‘w’) or die(”error opening file”);
fclose($ofile)

}

The last part of this function is to delete the file. Easy no?

function file_delete($file) {

$ofile = fopen($file, ‘w’) or die(”error opening file”);
fclose($ofile)

unlink($file)
}

Finally, we call the function from the page, passing through the file path for the file we want to delete.

file_delete(”images/intro.jpg”);