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 directory file is differentiated from a plain file by a flag in its inode(5) entry. It consists of records (directory entries) each of which contains information about a file and a pointer to the file itself. Directory 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 4
     * byte boundary with null bytes.  All names are guaranteed null terminated.
     * The maximum length of a name in a directory is MAXNAMLEN.
     */
    struct dirent {
    	__uint32_t d_fileno;		/* file number of 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 */
    #ifdef _POSIX_SOURCE
    	char	d_name[255 + 1];	/* name must be no longer than this */
    #else
    #define	MAXNAMLEN	255
    	char	d_name[MAXNAMLEN + 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 requires 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 4 byte boundary.
     */
    #define	_GENERIC_DIRSIZ(dp)     ((sizeof (struct dirent) - (MAXNAMLEN+1)) + (((dp)->d_namlen+1 + 3) &~ 3))
    #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 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 example the cd9660 file system.