Implementing the ls -al command in C

Question

As a part of an assignment from one of my classes, I have to write a program in C to duplicate the results of the ls -al command. I have read up on the necessary materials but I

Answer 1

myfile->d_name is the file name not the path, so you need to append the file name to the directory "Downloads/file.txt" first, if it's is not the working directory:

char buf[512];    
while((myfile = readdir(mydir)) != NULL)
{
    sprintf(buf, "%s/%s", argv[1], myfile->d_name);
    stat(buf, &mystat);
....

As to why it prints 4096 that is the size of the links . and .. from the last call to stat().

Note: you should allocate a buffer large enough to hold the directory name, the file name the NULL byte and the separator, something like this

strlen(argv[1]) + NAME_MAX + 2;