How do you get a directory listing in C

Question

How do you scan a directory for folders and files in C  It needs to be cross-platform

User · Answer

The strict answer is  you can t   as the very concept of a folder is not truly cross-platform   On MS platforms you can use  findfirst   findnext and  findclose for a  c  sort of feel  and FindFirstFile and FindNextFile for the underlying Win32 calls   Here s the C-FAQ answer     http   c-faq com osdep readdir html

User · Answer

opendir readdir are POSIX  If POSIX is not enough for the portability you want to achieve  check Apache Portable Runtime

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I ve created an open source  BSD  C header that deals with this problem  It currently supports POSIX and Windows  Please check it out   https   github com cxong tinydir  tinydir dir dir  tinydir open  amp dir    path to dir     while  dir has next        tinydir file file      tinydir readfile  amp dir   amp file        printf   s   file name       if  file is dir                printf                 printf   n         tinydir next  amp dir      tinydir close  amp dir

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GLib is a portability utility library for C which forms the basis of the GTK  graphical toolkit  It can be used as a standalone library   It contains portable wrappers for managing directories  See Glib File Utilities documentation for details   Personally  I wouldn t even consider writing large amounts of C-code without something like GLib behind me  Portability is one thing  but it s also nice to get data structures  thread helpers  events  mainloops etc  for free   Jikes  I m almost starting to sound like a sales guy     don t worry  glib is open source  LGPL  and I m not affiliated with it in any way

User · Answer

There is no standard C  or C    way to enumerate files in a directory   Under Windows you can use the FindFirstFile FindNextFile functions to enumerate all entries in a directory  Under Linux OSX use the opendir readdir closedir functions

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Directory listing varies greatly according to the OS platform under consideration  This is because  various Operating systems using their own internal system calls to achieve this   A solution to this problem would be to look for a library which masks this problem and portable  Unfortunately  there is no solution that works on all platforms flawlessly    On POSIX compatible systems  you could use the library to achieve this using the code posted by Clayton  which is referenced originally from the Advanced Programming under UNIX book by W  Richard Stevens   this solution will work under  NIX systems and would also work on Windows if you have Cygwin installed   Alternatively  you could write a code to detect the underlying OS and then call the appropriate directory listing function which would hold the  proper  way of listing the directory structure under that OS

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The following POSIX program will print the names of the files in the current directory    define  XOPEN SOURCE 700  include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt sys types h gt   include  lt dirent h gt   int main  void      DIR  dp    struct dirent  ep         dp   opendir            if  dp    NULL          while  ep   readdir  dp         puts  ep- gt d name         void  closedir  dp         else     perror   Couldn t open the directory       return 0      Credit  http   www gnu org software libtool manual libc Simple-Directory-Lister html  Tested in Ubuntu 16 04

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You can find the sample code on the wikibooks link                                                                     A simpler and shorter implementation of ls 1     ls 1  is very similar to the DIR command on DOS and Windows                                                                    include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt dirent h gt   int listdir const char  path       struct dirent  entry    DIR  dp     dp   opendir path     if  dp    NULL           perror  opendir        return -1         while  entry   readdir dp        puts entry- gt d name      closedir dp     return 0     int main int argc  char   argv      int counter   1     if  argc    1      listdir          while    counter  lt   argc        printf   nListing  s    n   argv counter-1        listdir argv counter-1           return 0

User · Answer

The most similar method to readdir is probably using the little-known  find family of functions

[c] How do you get a directory listing in C?

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