redirecting confusion

[kiros88]

Okay so I'm not really sure what I'm looking for but I can't find an example to figure it out.

So if I had a directory with a bunch of files could be text files. the directory is text.
and on linux I want to make a program that reads all the files in the directory so I want to use the redirect command on linux

myprog < text

what does my program to have to read the files in the directory "text"?
like is there an example because all the redirect commands all have examples redirecting files but I want to redirect a directory.
I need a C program to read in the directory Usually reads it in with a struct like

FILE *in

is there like a struct for directorys?

[cas]

You can't do precisely what you want. Instead, pass the name of the directory as an argument and use opendir()/readdir(), or perhaps scandir(), to read the directory entries.

[bernt]

How about

myprog < text/*

that'll use bash to go through all the files in the directory

[kiros88]

Thanks cas I going to go towards that directions I actually had one more question about redirection

myprog < file1

what structure can take the file in is it part of stdin and i would need to use fgets

/ or is it like
FILE in*
and in is "file1"

yea im just really not sure how to use < and having a hard time finding some tutorial thats useful

[claudiu]

Well if you mean what data type is the argument you pass to the program, it is a char array. You need to declare a FILE pointer that points to the file named argv[1] as such:

 
int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
   
   FILE *fp;
   fp = fopen(argv[1],"r");

   return 0;
}

So, if you run your program as:

./myprog myfile.txt

argv[1] will contain "file.txt".

If you redirect what bernt said, then you will simply get a huge text of all the files and folders in that dir:

i.e. ./myprog < text/*

[brewbuck]

If you redirect what bernt said, then you will simply get a huge text of all the files and folders in that dir:

No you won't. Redirection doesn't work that way. Redirection takes a SINGLE file and sends it to stdin. Listing multiple files doesn't do what you're saying.

[kiros88]

okay so im still kinda of confused on how to do this

myprog < file1.txt

so im assuming stdin is the connection to FILE stream for file1.txt
but how to i create the program to store in a string variable file1.txt
without knowing its already file1.txt so it could be any random txt file but i want my program to store it on a char* variable the title of the file?