The other day the new developer  in my office wanted to get a directory listing using  PHP as he was writting a new plugin for WordPress. To his surprise this is really easy with the glob() function:

<?php
foreach (glob("*") as $filename) {
    echo $filename . 'size ' . filesize($filename) . 'n';
}

Glob allows you to use patterns similar to those when you are using the ls command in Terminal and returns the file list as an array.