Gathers the statistics of the file or symbolic link named by filename. This function is identical to the stat() function except that if the filename parameter is a symbolic link, the status of the symbolic link is returned, not the status of the file pointed to by the symbolic link.
See the manual page for stat() for information on the structure of the array that lstat() returns.
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.
See also stat().