Dirent(3pm)

NAME
IO::Dirent - Access to dirent structs returned by readdir

SYNOPSIS
  use IO::Dirent;

  ## slurp-style
  opendir DIR, "/usr/local/foo";
  my @entries = readdirent(DIR);
  closedir DIR;

  print $entries[0]->{name}, "\n";
  print $entries[0]->{type}, "\n";
  print $entries[0]->{inode}, "\n";

  ## using the enumerator
  opendir DIR, "/etc";
  while( my $entry = nextdirent(DIR) ) {
    print $entry->{name} . "\n";
  }
  closedir DIR;

DESCRIPTION
readdirent returns a list of hashrefs. Each hashref contains the name of the directory entry, its inode for the filesystem it resides on and its type (if available). If the file type or inode are not available, it won't be there!

nextdirent returns the next dirent as a hashref, allowing you to iterate over directory entries one by one. This may be helpful in low-memory situations or where you have enormous directories.

IO::Dirent exports the following symbols by default:

    readdirent

    nextdirent

The following tags may be exported to your namespace:

    ALL

which includes readdirent, nextdirent and the following symbols:

    DT_UNKNOWN
    DT_FIFO
    DT_CHR
    DT_DIR
    DT_BLK
    DT_REG
    DT_LNK
    DT_SOCK
    DT_WHT

These symbols can be used to test the file type returned by readdirent in the following manner:

    for my $entry ( readdirent(DIR) ) {
        next unless $entry->{'type'} == DT_LNK;

        print $entry->{'name'} . " is a symbolic link.\n";
    }

For platforms that do not implement file type in its dirent struct, readdirent will return a hashref with a single key/value of 'name' and the filename (effectively the same as readdir). This is subject to change, if I can implement some of the to do items below.

CAVEATS
This was written on FreeBSD and OS X which implement a robust (but somewhat non-standard) dirent struct and which includes a file type entry. I have plans to make this module more portable and useful by doing a stat on each directory entry to find the file type and inode number when the dirent.h does not implement it otherwise.

Improvements and additional ports are welcome.

TO DO

•   For platforms that do not implement a dirent struct with file type, do a stat on the entry and populate the structure anyway.

•   Do some memory profiling (I'm not sure if I have any leaks or not).

COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2002, 2011 Scott Wiersdorf.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Perl Artistic License.

AUTHOR
Scott Wiersdorf, <scott@perlcode.org>

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Nick Ing-Simmons for his help on the perl-xs mailing list.

SEE ALSO
dirent(5), perlxstut, perlxs, perlguts, perlapi

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2007 by Scott Wiersdorf

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.1 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.