Question

I’m looking for a function that will return a list of what is in a particular directory.
The closest that I have gotten is by using this:

system("dir");

But this only prints the contents of the working directory, and I can’t CD to anywhere else.

I’m using windows, and I have no plans to make it cross-platform, so don’t worry about that.

Answer 1

Look at the following example directly copied from this page. It uses boost::filesystem so works on all major systems.

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    path p (/* Specify a directory here */);

    try
    {
        if (exists(p))    // does p actually exist?
        {
            if (is_regular_file(p))        // is p a regular file?   
                cout << p << " size is " << file_size(p) << '\n';
            else if (is_directory(p))      // is p a directory?
            {
                cout << p << " is a directory containing:\n";

                copy(directory_iterator(p), directory_iterator(), // directory_iterator::value_type
                  ostream_iterator<directory_entry>(cout, "\n")); // is directory_entry, which is
                                                                  // converted to a path by the
                                                                  // path stream inserter
            }
            else
                cout << p << " exists, but is neither a regular file nor a directory\n";
        }
        else
            cout << p << " does not exist\n";
    }

    catch (const filesystem_error& ex)
    {
        cout << ex.what() << '\n';
    }

    return 0;
}