Open directory using C

Question

I am accepting the path through command line input.

When I do

dir=opendir(args[1]);

it doesn\' t enter the loop...i.e dir==nu

Answer 1

You should really post your code^(a), but here goes. Start with something like:

    #include 
    #include 

    int main (int argc, char *argv[]) {
        struct dirent *pDirent;
        DIR *pDir;

        // Ensure correct argument count.

        if (argc != 2) {
            printf ("Usage: testprog \n");
            return 1;
        }

        // Ensure we can open directory.

        pDir = opendir (argv[1]);
        if (pDir == NULL) {
            printf ("Cannot open directory '%s'\n", argv[1]);
            return 1;
        }

        // Process each entry.

        while ((pDirent = readdir(pDir)) != NULL) {
            printf ("[%s]\n", pDirent->d_name);
        }

        // Close directory and exit.

        closedir (pDir);
        return 0;
    }

You need to check in your case that args[1] is both set and refers to an actual directory. A sample run, with tmp is a subdirectory off my current directory but you can use any valid directory, gives me: testprog tmp

[.]
[..]
[file1.txt]
[file1_file1.txt]
[file2.avi]
[file2_file2.avi]
[file3.b.txt]
[file3_file3.b.txt]

Note also that you have to pass a directory in, not a file. When I execute:

testprog tmp/file1.txt

I get:

Cannot open directory 'tmp/file1.txt'

That's because it's a file rather than a directory (though, if you're sneaky, you can attempt to use diropen(dirname(argv[1])) if the initial diropen fails).

---

^(a) This has now been rectified but, since this answer has been accepted, I'm going to assume it was the issue of whatever you were passing in.