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Format of a Directory Entry

This section describes what you find in a single directory entry, as you might obtain it from a directory stream. All the symbols are declared in the header file `dirent.h'.

Data Type: struct dirent

This is a structure type used to return information about directory entries. It contains the following fields:

char *d_name

This is the null-terminated file name component. This is the only field you can count on in all POSIX systems.

ino_t d_fileno

This is the file serial number. For BSD compatibility, you can also refer to this member as d_ino.

size_t d_namlen

This is the length of the file name, not including the terminating null character.

This structure may contain additional members in the future.

When a file has multiple names, each name has its own directory entry. The only way you can tell that the directory entries belong to a single file is that they have the same value for the d_fileno field.

File attributes such as size, modification times, and the like are part of the file itself, not any particular directory entry. See section File Attributes.

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