Name

readdir — read a directory

Synopsis

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <dirent.h>
struct dirent *readdir( DIR *  dir);

DESCRIPTION

The readdir() function returns a pointer to a dirent structure representing the next directory entry in the directory stream pointed to by dir. It returns NULL on reaching the end-of-file or if an error occurred.

On Linux, the dirent structure is defined as follows:

struct dirent {
  ino_t   d_ino; /* inode number */
  off_t   d_off; /* offset to the next dirent */
  unsigned short   d_reclen; /* length of this record */
  unsigned char   d_type; /* type of file */
  char   d_name[256]; /* filename */
};

According to POSIX, the dirent structure contains a field char d_name[] of unspecified size, with at most NAME_MAX characters preceding the terminating null byte. POSIX.1-2001 also documents the field ino_t d_ino as an XSI extension. Use of other fields will harm the portability of your programs.

The data returned by readdir() may be overwritten by subsequent calls to readdir() for the same directory stream.

RETURN VALUE

The readdir() function returns a pointer to a dirent structure, or NULL if an error occurs or end-of-file is reached. On error, errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

EBADF

Invalid directory stream descriptor dir.

CONFORMING TO

SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001

SEE ALSO

read(2), closedir(3), dirfd(3), ftw(3), opendir(3), rewinddir(3), scandir(3), seekdir(3), telldir(3)


  Copyright (C) 1993 David Metcalfe (david@prism.demon.co.uk)

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References consulted:
    Linux libc source code
    Lewine's _POSIX Programmer's Guide_ (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991)
    386BSD man pages
Modified Sat Jul 24 16:09:49 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
Modified 11 June 1995 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl)
Modified 22 July 1996 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl)