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!

Answer 1

Just use ls?

ls /path/to/directory

Alternatively, use opendir() and readdir(), see man 3 opendir and man 3 readdir

Answer 2

maybe you are looking for

ls /path/to/folder

Answer 3

If you want to see the contents of the parent directory you can use ls ..

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

You can use ls just as you suggested. Check out the ls man page. Example:

$ ls /tmp/somedir
file1  file2