DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

DIR(5)                   DragonFly File Formats Manual                  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 direc-
     tory 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 directo-
     ries 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 <sys/dirent.h>.  This file
     should not be included directly by applications.

SEE ALSO
     fs(5), inode(5)

HISTORY
     A dir file format appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.

BUGS
     The usage of the member d_type of struct dirent is unportable as it is
     DragonFly/FreeBSD-specific.  It also may fail on certain filesystems, for
     example the cd9660 filesystem.

DragonFly 3.5                    March 5, 2005                   DragonFly 3.5