How to list first level directories only in C?

Question

In a terminal I can call ls -d */. Now I want a c program to do that for me, like this:

#include 
#include          


        

Answer 1

Just call system. Globs on Unixes are expanded by the shell. system will give you a shell.

You can avoid the whole fork-exec thing by doing the glob(3) yourself:

int ec;
glob_t gbuf;
if(0==(ec=glob("*/", 0, NULL, &gbuf))){
    char **p = gbuf.gl_pathv;
    if(p){
        while(*p)
            printf("%s\n", *p++);
    }
}else{
   /*handle glob error*/ 
}

You could pass the results to a spawned ls, but there's hardly a point in doing that.

(If you do want to do fork and exec, you should start with a template that does proper error checking -- each of those calls may fail.)