Cross platform way of testing whether a file is a directory

Alex Gaynor picture Alex Gaynor · Feb 4, 2010 · Viewed 6.9k times · Source

Currently I have some code like (condensed and removed a bunch of error checking):

dp = readdir(dir);
if (dp->d_type == DT_DIR) {
}

This works swimmingly on my Linux machine. However on another machine (looks like SunOS, sparc):

SunOS HOST 5.10 Generic_127127-11 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10

I get the following error at compile time:

error: structure has no member named `d_type'
error: `DT_DIR' undeclared (first use in this function)

I thought the dirent.h header was crossplatform (for POSIX machines). Any suggestions.

Answer

kennytm picture kennytm · Feb 4, 2010

Ref http://www.nexenta.org/os/Porting_Codefixes:

The struct dirent definition in solaris does not contain the d_type field. You would need to make the changes as follows

if (de->d_type == DT_DIR)
{
   return 0;
}

changes to

struct stat s; /*include sys/stat.h if necessary */
..
..
stat(de->d_name, &s);
if (s.st_mode & S_IFDIR)
{
  return 0;
}

Since stat is also POSIX standard it should be more cross-platform. But you may want to use if ((s.st_mode & S_IFMT) == S_IFDIR) to follow the standard.