This could come in handy, especially on shared systems with no or restricted access to execve(2)-driven commands such as exec() and shell_exec(). You can't always depend on being able to run du and such (and of course, you might be stuck on a Windoze server rather that *nix like God intended . . . )

I've got good news, and I've got bad news:
The universe is merely a figment of my imagination.
Now are you ready for the bad news?

Kind of like this other one: Get the Size of a Folder

Both have something special though:
- this one works for both dirs and files, but it throws an error if $path is neither dir or file (just malformed)
- the other checks for correct dir name, but doesn't accept files at all