Question

What is the correct way to read and extract data from text files when you know that there will be many in a directory? I know that you can use fopen() to get the pointer to the file, and then do something like while(fgets(..) != null){} to read from the entire file, but then how could I read from another file? I want to loop through every file in the directory.

Answer 1

Sam, you can use opendir/readdir as in the following little function.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <dirent.h>

static void scan_dir(const char *dir)
{
    struct dirent * entry;
    DIR *d = opendir( dir );

    if (d == 0) {
        perror("opendir");
        return;
    }

    while ((entry = readdir(d)) != 0) {
        printf("%s\n", entry->d_name);
        //read your file here
    }
    closedir(d);
}


int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
    scan_dir(argv[1]);
    return 0;
}

This just opens a directory named on the command line and prints the names of all files it contains. But instead of printing the names, you can process the files as you like…