dirent(FP)                     6 January 1993                     dirent(FP)


 Name

    dirent - filesystem-independent directory entry

 Syntax


    #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(S) system
    call.

    The dirent structure is defined below.

       struct    dirent {
                         ino_t          d_ino;
                         short          d_pad;
                         off_t          d_off;
                         unsigned short d_reclen;
                         char           d_name[1];
                         };

    The dino is a number which is unique for each file in the file system.
    The field doff is the offset of that directory entry in the actual file
    system directory.  The field dname is the beginning of the character
    array giving the name of the directory entry.  This name is null ter-
    minated and may have at most MAXNAMLEN characters.  This results in file-
    system-independent directory entries that are variable length entities.
    The value of dreclen 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(S)

 Standards conformance

    dirent is conformant with:
    AT&T SVID Issue 2;
    and X/Open Portability Guide, Issue 3, 1989.