### 14.3 Accessing Directories ¶

The facilities described in this section let you read the contents of a directory file. This is useful if you want your program to list all the files in a directory, perhaps as part of a menu.

The `opendir` function opens a directory stream whose elements are directory entries. Alternatively `fdopendir` can be used which can have advantages if the program needs to have more control over the way the directory is opened for reading. This allows, for instance, to pass the `O_NOATIME` flag to `open`.

You use the `readdir` function on the directory stream to retrieve these entries, represented as `struct dirent` objects. The name of the file for each entry is stored in the `d_name` member of this structure. There are obvious parallels here to the stream facilities for ordinary files, described in Input/Output on Streams.