DIRENT(4)

NAME
dirent - file system independent directory entry

SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/dirent.h>

DESCRIPTION
Different file system types may have different directory entries. The dirent structure defines a file system independent directory entry, which contains information common to directory entries in different file system types. A set of these structures is returned by the getdents(2) system call.

The dirent structure is defined below.
struct    dirent    {
    long    d_ino;
    off_t    d_off;
    unsigned short    d_reclen;
    char    d_name[1];
        };

The field d_ino is a number which is unique for each file in the file system. The field d_off represents an offset of that directory entry in the actual file system directory. The field d_name is the beginning of the character array giving the name of the directory entry. This name is null terminated and may have at most NAME_MAX characters in addition to the null terminator. This results in file system independent directory entries being variable-length entities. The value of d_reclen is the record length of this entry. This length is defined to be the number of bytes between the beginning of the current entry and the next one, adjusted so that the next entry will start on a long boundary.

FILES
/usr/include/sys/dirent.h

SEE ALSO
getdents(2).

WARNING
The field d_off does not have a simple interpretation for some file system types and should not be used directly by applications.