How can I get the list of files in a directory using C/C++?

Standard C++ doesn't provide a way to do this. You could use the system command to initialize the ls command as follows −

Example

#include<iostream>
int main () {
   char command[50] = "ls -l";
   system(command);
   return 0;
}

Output

This will give the output −

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9728 Feb 25 20:51 a.out
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   131 Feb 25 20:44 hello.cpp
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   243 Sep  7 13:09 hello.py
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33198 Jan  7 11:42 hello.o
drwxrwxrwx 0 root root   512 Oct  1 21:40 hydeout
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root    42 Oct 21 11:29 my_file.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   527 Oct 21 11:29 watch.py

If you're on windows, you can use dir instead of ls to display the list.

Example

You can use the direct package(https://github.com/tronkko/dirent) to use a much more flexible API. You can use it as follows to get a list of files −

#include <iostream>
#include <dirent.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

using namespace std;
void list_dir(const char *path) {
   struct dirent *entry;
   DIR *dir = opendir(path);
   
   if (dir == NULL) {
      return;
   }
   while ((entry = readdir(dir)) != NULL) {
   cout << entry->d_name << endl;
   }
   closedir(dir);
}
int main() {
   list_dir("/home/username/Documents");
}

Output

This will give the output −

a.out
hello.cpp
hello.py
hello.o
hydeout
my_file.txt
watch.py

Chandu yadav

Updated on 27-Jan-2020 12:32:32

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