DIRENT(4)                                                            DIRENT(4)



NAME
     dirent, dirent64 - file system independent directory entry

SYNOPSIS
     #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 {
               ino_t          d_ino;
               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 an opaque offset (i.e., not necessarily in bytes) of
     the next 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 terminated and may have at most
     MAXNAMLEN characters.  This results in file system independent directory
     entries being 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 properly aligned.

     The dirent64 structure differs from the dirent structure in the types of
     the dino and doff fields. dino is a ino64t and doff is an off64t.
     The dirent64 structure is used with the getdents64, ngetdents64,
     readdir64, telldir64, and seekdir64 calls.

SEE ALSO
     directory(3C), getdents(2).














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