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.
Note: This function will not work on remote files as the file to be examined must be accessible via the servers filesystem.
See also stat().