See if you can use the opendir and readdir functions, which are part of the POSIX
standard and are available on most Unix variants. Implementations also exist for
MS-DOS, VMS, and other systems. (MS-DOS also has FINDFIRST and FINDNEXT routines
which do essentially the same thing, and MS Windows has FindFirstFile and FindNextFile.)
readdir returns just the file names; if you need more information about the file,
try calling stat. To match filenames to some wildcard pattern,
Here is a tiny example which lists the files in the current directory:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <dirent.h>
main()
{
struct dirent *dp;
DIR *dfd = opendir(".");
if(dfd != NULL) {
while((dp = readdir(dfd)) != NULL)
printf("%sn", dp->d_name);
closedir(dfd);
}
return 0;
}
(On older systems, the header file to #include may be <direct.h> or <dir.h>,
and the pointer returned by readdir may be a struct direct *. This example assumes
that "." is a synonym for the current directory.)
In a pinch, you could use popen to call an operating system list-directory program,
and read its output. (If you only need the filenames displayed to the user, you
could conceivably use system