FreeBSD Manual Pages
DIR(5) File Formats Manual DIR(5) NAME dir, dirent -- directory file format SYNOPSIS #include <dirent.h> DESCRIPTION Directories provide a convenient hierarchical method of grouping files while obscuring the underlying details of the storage medium. A direc- tory file is differentiated from a plain file by a flag in its inode(5) entry. It consists of records (directory entries) each of which con- tains information about a file and a pointer to the file itself. Di- rectory entries may contain other directories as well as plain files; such nested directories are referred to as subdirectories. A hierarchy of directories and files is formed in this manner and is called a file system (or referred to as a file system tree). Each directory file contains two special directory entries; one is a pointer to the directory itself called dot `.' and the other a pointer to its parent directory called dot-dot `..'. Dot and dot-dot are valid pathnames, however, the system root directory `/', has no parent and dot-dot points to itself like dot. File system nodes are ordinary directory files on which has been grafted a file system object, such as a physical disk or a partitioned area of such a disk. (See mount(2) and mount(8).) The directory entry format is defined in the file <sys/dirent.h> (which should not be included directly by applications): #ifndef _SYS_DIRENT_H_ #define _SYS_DIRENT_H_ #include <machine/ansi.h> /* * The dirent structure defines the format of directory entries returned by * the getdirentries(2) system call. * * A directory entry has a struct dirent at the front of it, containing its * inode number, the length of the entry, and the length of the name * contained in the entry. These are followed by the name padded to a 8 * byte boundary with null bytes. All names are guaranteed null terminated. * The maximum length of a name in a directory is MAXNAMLEN. * Explicit pad is added between the last member of the header and * d_name, to avoid having the ABI padding in the end of dirent on * LP64 arches. There is code depending on d_name being last. Also, * keeping this pad for ILP32 architectures simplifies compat32 layer. */ struct dirent { ino_t d_fileno; /* file number of entry */ off_t d_off; /* directory offset of the next entry */ __uint16_t d_reclen; /* length of this record */ __uint8_t d_type; /* file type, see below */ __uint8_t d_namlen; /* length of string in d_name */ __uint32_t d_pad0; #if __BSD_VISIBLE #define MAXNAMLEN 255 char d_name[MAXNAMLEN + 1]; /* name must be no longer than this */ #else char d_name[255 + 1]; /* name must be no longer than this */ #endif }; /* * File types */ #define DT_UNKNOWN 0 #define DT_FIFO 1 #define DT_CHR 2 #define DT_DIR 4 #define DT_BLK 6 #define DT_REG 8 #define DT_LNK 10 #define DT_SOCK 12 #define DT_WHT 14 /* * Convert between stat structure types and directory types. */ #define IFTODT(mode) (((mode) & 0170000) >> 12) #define DTTOIF(dirtype) ((dirtype) << 12) /* * The _GENERIC_DIRSIZ macro gives the minimum record length which will hold * the directory entry. This returns the amount of space in struct direct * without the d_name field, plus enough space for the name with a terminating * null byte (dp->d_namlen+1), rounded up to a 8 byte boundary. * * XXX although this macro is in the implementation namespace, it requires * a manifest constant that is not. */ #define _GENERIC_DIRLEN(namlen) ((__offsetof(struct dirent, d_name) + (namlen) + 1 + 7) & ~7) #define _GENERIC_DIRSIZ(dp) _GENERIC_DIRLEN((dp)->d_namlen) #endif /* __BSD_VISIBLE */ #ifdef _KERNEL #define GENERIC_DIRSIZ(dp) _GENERIC_DIRSIZ(dp) #endif #endif /* !_SYS_DIRENT_H_ */ SEE ALSO fs(5), inode(5) HISTORY A dir file format appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX. BUGS The usage of the member d_type of struct dirent is unportable as it is FreeBSD-specific. It also may fail on certain file systems, for exam- ple the cd9660 file system. FreeBSD 14.3 November 14, 2018 DIR(5)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | BUGS
Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dirent&manpath=FreeBSD+14.3-RELEASE+and+Ports>