On reading Directory contents and listing them.

[Deathfrost]

Hello everyone,

Been having fun reading through the many interesting tutorials here, and decided to ask directly on something.

Just practising with the code of reading in files of a directory, and printing out.
I want the code to always read the files only stored in the directory rib_seqfiles. The problem is that when it prints out the output, it correctly prints all the files in the folder, but also prints out . and ..

Heres the code:-

inser

struct dirent *pfileList;
DIR *pDIR;
pDIR = opendir("rib_seqfiles");

    if ( pDIR == NULL )
    {
      printf("The directory you attempting to open == NULLls");  exit(1);
     }


       pfileList = readdir( pDIR ); 
       while ( pfileList != NULL )
        {
                printf( "%s\n", pfileList->d_name );
                pfileList = readdir( pDIR );
         }

Heres an example of the output:-

example2.rib
.
example1.rib
lahma.rib
lahma (3rd copy)
..

In case this matters, the reason I don't want . and .. printed out is that in the while loop I plan to run a function that takes the filename as an argument and does some stuff to it, and I want to do this for every file in the folder.

Thanks in advance,

[cas]

Just compare each entry to "." and "..". If it matches either of those, ignore it.

[Deathfrost]

Ah ok, the idea occurred to me. but I wasn't sure if there was some command thats part of the language that would ignroe those.

[MK27]

Ah ok, the idea occurred to me. but I wasn't sure if there was some command thats part of the language that would ignroe those.

You have misunderstood something

Commands that would ignore "." and ".." are things that exist in other languages, where the compiler or interpreter are written in C. But sometimes not -- I guess this is a toss up since it could not be much more than a 25 character line in any language.

[itCbitC]

Comparing the filename pfileList->d_name returned from readdir() to "." and ".." is okay if those are the only directories there. But if there are other directories whose names are not known in advance, an alternative is to stat() the filename and see if it is a regular file (S_IFREG) or not. This way all directories can be excluded from the list.

[Deathfrost]

Comparing the filename pfileList->d_name returned from readdir() to "." and ".." is okay if those are the only directories there. But if there are other directories whose names are not known in advance, an alternative is to stat() the filename and see if it is a regular file (S_IFREG) or not. This way all directories can be excluded from the list.

There shouldn't be any other directories inside, but I suppose in the interest of robustness, that sounds like the better way of doing it. Anyway using the following code didn't work:-

pfileList = readdir( pDIR );
while ( pfileList != NULL ) 
 
 {   
if(pfileList->d_name =="." || pfileList->d_name=="..") //checks to see if the current file read in pfileList is not "." or ".." 
 {
  pfileList =readdir(pDIR);
 }        
 else
   {
 char *str1=commandName;
 char *str2=pfileList->d_name;
 printf("\n\nfilename name is %s",str2);
 pfileList = readdir( pDIR );
  }
}

It still prints out "." and "..", this is just the related section, I have all the variables declared.

[tabstop]

Since when has == been able to compare strings? (Hint: never.) (Double hint: There is a "string compare" function strcmp.)

[Deathfrost]

Since when has == been able to compare strings? (Hint: never.) (Double hint: There is a "string compare" function strcmp.)

Haha, sorry I just figured out that == is not comparing two strings. Am I correct in saying its comparing 2 pointers? Yeah got it to work thanks. This is only my 2nd program in C ever, and I'm having a hard time keeping straight what is pointing to what.

[itCbitC]

Haha, sorry I just figured out that == is not comparing two strings. Am I correct in saying its comparing 2 pointers?...

Yep! it's comparing the two pointers.

[dwks]

. . . which are extremely unlikely to ever be the same. Reason being, the ".." string literals are, well, string literals. The compiler will probably collect all occurrences of the same string literal and make them actually refer to the same string, but I doubt it would do this between files. I don't know much about readdir() and friends, but it probably doesn't use a string literal to represent "." and ".." anyway (I'd imagine it would either dynamically allocate the memory or use a buffer inside the structure). So the pointer comparisons would probably always fail.