Structure within structure

[vajra11]

I understand the declaration of pointer and structure in c programming

Declaration of integer pointer

 /*declaration of integer pointer*/
int *next;

Declaration of structure

 /*declaration of structure*/struct student 
{
    int id;
    char name[20];
 
}profile;

I'm confused with following declaration

struct student {   
  struct student *next;
}profile;

here student is name of structure and next is pointer variable

What is meaning of following line

 struct student *next;

[Guest]

That line just means:

student *next;

But in C you have to specify the structness of the type to help the compiler. In C++ you wouldn't.

[rstanley]

This would be a struct for a node in a linked list data structure, where the pointer "next" in one node would point to the next node in the list, or be set to NULL if this is the only, or last node in the list.

Please see a description of a linked list here, or Google it for more detailed and extensive tutorials on single and double linked lists.

You might want to study further topics in Data Structures and Algorithms in C. A simple Google search will yield many links to online tutorials, books and PDF files.