NAME

readdir - directory input parser for gawk

SYNOPSIS

@load "readdir"

DESCRIPTION

The readdir extension adds an input parser for directories.

When this extension is in use, instead of skipping directories named on the command line (or with getline), they are read, with each entry returned as a record.

The record consists of three fields. The first two are the inode number and the filename, separated by a forward slash character. On systems where the directory entry contains the file type, the record has a third field which is a single letter indicating the type of the file: f for file, d for directory, b for a block device, c for a character device, p for a FIFO, l for a symbolic link, s for a socket.

On systems without the file type information, the extension falls back to calling stat(2), in order to provide the information. Thus the third field should never be u.

By default, if a directory cannot be opened (due to permission problems, for example), gawk will exit. As with regular files, this situation can be handled using a BEGINFILE rule that checks ERRNO and prints an error or otherwise handles the problem.

EXAMPLE

@load "readdir"
...
BEGIN { FS = "/" }
{ print "file name is", $2 }

AUTHOR

Arnold Robbins, arnold@skeeve.com.

COPYING PERMISSIONS

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual page provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual page under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.