LINUX: List contents of a outside folder or of a subfolder without leaving current folder
Question
I have a c program that watches over a folder somewhere in your directory (location is given when program starts up). One of its tasks is to tell the user what contents are stored in that specified folder. I was thinking of piping the ls command but I'm unsure how to get contents of a folder in which you are not currently in. Help?
Thanks!
Solution
Just use ls?
ls /path/to/directory
Alternatively, use opendir()
and readdir()
, see man 3 opendir
and man 3 readdir
OTHER TIPS
maybe you are looking for
ls /path/to/folder
If you want to see the contents of the parent directory you can use ls ..
The other answers are suitable if you are at the terminal, but you would probably like a C API, rather than an expensive call to fork the process and list a directory.
For a C API, you'll want to take a look at opendir
, readdir
and closedir
- this is a perfectly good reference.
You can use ls
just as you suggested. Check out the ls
man page. Example:
$ ls /tmp/somedir
file1 file2