HP-UX Reference (11i v1 05/09) - 5 Miscellaneous Topics (vol 9)

dirent(5) dirent(5)

NAME

dirent.h - format of directory streams and directory entries

SYNOPSIS

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <dirent.h>

DESCRIPTION

This header ﬁle deﬁnes data types used by the directory stream routines described in directory(3C).

The following data types are deﬁned:

DIR A structure containing information about an open directory stream.

struct dirent A structure deﬁning the format of entries returned by the readdir function (see

directory(3C)).

The struct dirent structure includes the following members:

char d_name[MAXNAMLEN+1]; /* name of directory entry */

ino_t d_ino; /* file serial number */

short d_namlen; /* length of string in d_name */

short d_reclen; /* length of this record */

The constant

MAXNAMLEN is deﬁned in <dirent.h>.

Note that the d_reclen entry is used internally to represent the offset from the current entry to the next

valid entry. Therefore, d_reclen is not the length of the current entry, but the length of the current record

where a record is an entry plus any currently unused space between the current entry and the next valid

entry. The unused space between valid dirent entries results from changes in a directory’s contents, such

as the deletion of ﬁles and other directories.

This ﬁle also contains external declarations for the functions in the directory(3C) package.

AUTHOR

dirent.h was developed by AT&T and HP.