Question

I’m not able to identify the error thrown by stat. The below program reads all files in a directory and prints the file name:

DIR *dp;
struct dirent *dirp;
struct stat sb;

if((dp = opendir(argv[1]))==NULL)
{
    perror("can't open dir");
}
while((dirp = readdir(dp))!=NULL)
{
    if (stat(dirp->d_name, &sb) == -1) {
        perror("stat");
    }   
    printf("File name:               %s \n",dirp->d_name);
}

Sample output:

/home/eipe
stat error: No such file or directory
File name:               copyofsample 
File name:               a.out 
File name:               . 
stat error: No such file or directory
File name:               udpclient.c 
File name:               .. 
stat error: No such file or directory
File name:               client.c 
stat error: No such file or directory
File name:               ftpclient.c 

Here are the contents:

ls -l /home/eipe/c

-rwxr-xr-x 1 eipe egroup 7751 2011-02-24 15:18 a.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 eipe egroup  798 2011-02-24 13:50 client.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 eipe egroup   15 2011-02-24 15:34 copyofsample
-rw-r--r-- 1 eipe egroup 1795 2011-02-24 15:33 ftpclient.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 eipe egroup  929 2011-02-24 13:34 udpclient.c

Answer 1

dirp->d_name is the name of the file in the directory: for example, "udpclient.c". The full name of the file is thus "/home/eipe/c/udpclient.c" – but your current working directory is /home/eipe, so stat() is trying to access "/home/eipe/udpclient.c", which doesn’t exist.

You can either change your working directory to argv[1] using chdir(), or you can prepend argv[1] to each filename before you call stat().