What determines the order directory entries are returned by getdents?

Question

Background is I have an existing application which lists directory entries; strace reveals it just calls getdents and lists them in the order returned. I would like them display

Answer 1

If you really are determined to change this program's behaviour (of which I assume that you don't have the source code available), you can use LD_PRELOAD to hook the call to opendir and readdir and replace it with your own, sorting wrapper. An example how such a hook could look like is the following:

#define _GNU_SOURCE 1
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

struct __dirstream
{
  int __fd;
  char *__data;
  size_t __allocation;
  size_t __offset;
  size_t __size;
  struct dirent __entry;
};

typedef struct _dirent_list {
  struct dirent *value;
  struct _dirent_list *next;
} dirent_list;

typedef struct _my_DIR {
  struct __dirstream orig;
  dirent_list *first_entry;
  int first_readdir;
} my_DIR;

DIR *opendir(const char *name) {
  DIR *(*orig_opendir)(const char*) = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "opendir");
  DIR *dir = orig_opendir(name);

  // save additional information along with the
  // original DIR structure
  my_DIR *my_dir = calloc(1, sizeof(*my_dir));
  my_dir->first_readdir = 1;
  memcpy(my_dir, dir, sizeof(*dir));
  return (DIR*)my_dir;
}

struct dirent *readdir(DIR *dir) {
  struct dirent *(*orig_readdir)(DIR*) = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "readdir");
  my_DIR *my_dir = (my_DIR*)dir;
  dirent_list *item;

  if (my_dir->first_readdir) {
    struct dirent *entry;
    while ((entry = orig_readdir(dir))) {
      // exercise for the reader:
      // implement insertion sort here 
      item = calloc(1, sizeof(*item));
      item->value = entry;
      item->next = my_dir->first_entry;
      my_dir->first_entry = item;
    }
    my_dir->first_readdir = 0;
  }

  if (!my_dir->first_entry)
    return NULL;

  item = my_dir->first_entry;
  struct dirent *result = item->value;
  my_dir->first_entry = item->next;
  free(item);

  return result;
}

It overrides opendir and readdir to return the entries in reverse order (you can adapt this for sorting too). This is how you use it with a program test that simply lists the directory entries in the order they are received:

$ gcc -Wall -shared -fPIC -o libhookdir.so hookdir.c -ldl
$ ./test
..
test
.
hookdir.c
libhookdir.so
test.c
$ LD_PRELOAD=./libhookdir.so ./test
test.c
libhookdir.so
hookdir.c
.
test
..

Hah! This works. We just hooked a libc function.