14.2 Accessing Directories

The facilities described in this section let you read the contents of a directory file. This is useful if you want your program to list all the files in a directory, perhaps as part of a menu.

The opendir function opens a directory stream whose elements are directory entries. You use the readdir function on the directory stream to retrieve these entries, represented as struct dirent objects. The name of the file for each entry is stored in the d_name member of this structure. There are obvious parallels here to the stream facilities for ordinary files, described in I/O on Streams.

• Directory Entries: Format of one directory entry.
• Opening a Directory: How to open a directory stream.
• Reading/Closing Directory: How to read directory entries from the stream.
• Simple Directory Lister: A very simple directory listing program.
• Random Access Directory: Rereading part of the directory already read with the same stream.
• Scanning Directory Content: Get entries for user selected subset of contents in given directory.
• Simple Directory Lister Mark II: Revised version of the program.