How can I get the list of files in a directory using C or C++?

Question

How can I determine the list of files in a directory from inside my C or C++ code?

I\'m not allowed to execute the ls command and parse the results from

Answer 1

Since files and sub directories of a directory are generally stored in a tree structure, an intuitive way is to use DFS algorithm to recursively traverse each of them. Here is an example in windows operating system by using basic file functions in io.h. You can replace these functions in other platform. What I want to express is that the basic idea of DFS perfectly meets this problem.

#include
#include
#include
using namespace std;

void TraverseFilesUsingDFS(const string& folder_path){
   _finddata_t file_info;
   string any_file_pattern = folder_path + "\\*";
   intptr_t handle = _findfirst(any_file_pattern.c_str(),&file_info);
   //If folder_path exsist, using any_file_pattern will find at least two files "." and "..", 
   //of which "." means current dir and ".." means parent dir
   if (handle == -1){
       cerr << "folder path not exist: " << folder_path << endl;
       exit(-1);
   }
   //iteratively check each file or sub_directory in current folder
   do{
       string file_name=file_info.name; //from char array to string
       //check whtether it is a sub direcotry or a file
       if (file_info.attrib & _A_SUBDIR){
            if (file_name != "." && file_name != ".."){
               string sub_folder_path = folder_path + "\\" + file_name;                
               TraverseFilesUsingDFS(sub_folder_path);
               cout << "a sub_folder path: " << sub_folder_path << endl;
            }
       }
       else
            cout << "file name: " << file_name << endl;
    } while (_findnext(handle, &file_info) == 0);
    //
    _findclose(handle);
}