2.3 Best way to read directories?

While historically there have been several different interfaces for this, the only one that really matters these days the the Posix.1 standard ‘<dirent.h>’ functions.

The function opendir() opens a specified directory; readdir() reads directory entries from it in a standardised format; closedir() does the obvious. Also provided are rewinddir(), telldir() and seekdir() which should also be obvious.

If you are looking to expand a wildcard filename, then most systems have the glob() function; also check out fnmatch() to match filenames against a wildcard, or ftw() to traverse entire directory trees.

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