opendir(3) — Linux manual page

opendir(3)              Library Functions Manual              opendir(3)

NAME

       opendir, fdopendir - open a directory

LIBRARY

       Standard C library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

       #include <sys/types.h>
       #include <dirent.h>

       DIR *opendir(const char *name);
       DIR *fdopendir(int fd);

   Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see
   feature_test_macros(7)):

       fdopendir():
           Since glibc 2.10:
               _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200809L
           Before glibc 2.10:
               _GNU_SOURCE

DESCRIPTION

       The opendir() function opens a directory stream corresponding to
       the directory name, and returns a pointer to the directory
       stream.  The stream is positioned at the first entry in the
       directory.

       The fdopendir() function is like opendir(), but returns a
       directory stream for the directory referred to by the open file
       descriptor fd.  After a successful call to fdopendir(), fd is
       used internally by the implementation, and should not otherwise
       be used by the application.

RETURN VALUE

       The opendir() and fdopendir() functions return a pointer to the
       directory stream.  On error, NULL is returned, and errno is set
       to indicate the error.

ERRORS

       EACCES Permission denied.

       EBADF  fd is not a valid file descriptor opened for reading.

       EMFILE The per-process limit on the number of open file
              descriptors has been reached.

       ENFILE The system-wide limit on the total number of open files
              has been reached.

       ENOENT Directory does not exist, or name is an empty string.

       ENOMEM Insufficient memory to complete the operation.

       ENOTDIR
              name is not a directory.

ATTRIBUTES

       For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
       attributes(7).
       ┌─────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
       │ Interface                           │ Attribute     │ Value   │
       ├─────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
       │ opendir(), fdopendir()              │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
       └─────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘

STANDARDS

       POSIX.1-2008.

STANDARDS

       opendir()
              SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.

       fdopendir()
              POSIX.1-2008.  glibc 2.4.

NOTES

       Filename entries can be read from a directory stream using
       readdir(3).

       The underlying file descriptor of the directory stream can be
       obtained using dirfd(3).

       The opendir() function sets the close-on-exec flag for the file
       descriptor underlying the DIR *.  The fdopendir() function leaves
       the setting of the close-on-exec flag unchanged for the file
       descriptor, fd.  POSIX.1-200x leaves it unspecified whether a
       successful call to fdopendir() will set the close-on-exec flag
       for the file descriptor, fd.

SEE ALSO

       open(2), closedir(3), dirfd(3), readdir(3), rewinddir(3),
       scandir(3), seekdir(3), telldir(3)

COLOPHON

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Linux man-pages 6.9.1          2024-05-02                     opendir(3)

Pages that refer to this page: close_range(2), execve(2), fanotify_mark(2), fork(2), open(2), closedir(3), dirfd(3), fts(3), getdirentries(3), glob(3), readdir(3), rewinddir(3), scandir(3), seekdir(3), telldir(3)

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