DIRENT(4)                            SysV                            DIRENT(4)



NAME
     dirent - file system independent directory entry

SYNOPSIS
     #include <sys/dirent.h>
     #include <sys/types.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                      /* data from readdir() */
                 {
                 long            d_ino;      /* inode number of entry */
                 unsigned short  d_reclen;   /* length of this record */
                 unsigned short  d_namlen;   /* length of string in d_name */
                 off_t           d_off;      /* offset of disk directory entry */
                 char            d_name[1];  /* name of file */
                 };

     The d_ino is a number which is unique for each file in the file system.
     The field d_off is the 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 MAXNAMLEN characters.  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 current entry and the next
     one, so that it will always result in the next entry being on a long
     boundary.

FILES
     /usr/include/sys/dirent.h

SEE ALSO
     getdents(2).