telldir(3) — Linux manual page

NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | ATTRIBUTES | STANDARDS | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

telldir(3)              Library Functions Manual              telldir(3)

NAME         top

       telldir - return current location in directory stream

LIBRARY         top

       Standard C library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <dirent.h>

       long telldir(DIR *dirp);

   Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see
   feature_test_macros(7)):

       telldir():
           _XOPEN_SOURCE
              || /* glibc >= 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
              || /* glibc <= 2.19: */ _BSD_SOURCE || _SVID_SOURCE

DESCRIPTION         top

       The telldir() function returns the current location associated
       with the directory stream dirp.

RETURN VALUE         top

       On success, the telldir() function returns the current location
       in the directory stream.  On error, -1 is returned, and errno is
       set to indicate the error.

ERRORS         top

       EBADF  Invalid directory stream descriptor dirp.

ATTRIBUTES         top

       For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
       attributes(7).
       ┌─────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
       │ Interface                           Attribute     Value   │
       ├─────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
       │ telldir()                           │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
       └─────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘

STANDARDS         top

       POSIX.1-2008.

HISTORY         top

       POSIX.1-2001, 4.3BSD.

       Up to glibc 2.1.1, the return type of telldir() was off_t.
       POSIX.1-2001 specifies long, and this is the type used since
       glibc 2.1.2.

       In early filesystems, the value returned by telldir() was a
       simple file offset within a directory.  Modern filesystems use
       tree or hash structures, rather than flat tables, to represent
       directories.  On such filesystems, the value returned by
       telldir() (and used internally by readdir(3)) is a "cookie" that
       is used by the implementation to derive a position within a
       directory.  Application programs should treat this strictly as an
       opaque value, making no assumptions about its contents.

SEE ALSO         top

       closedir(3), opendir(3), readdir(3), rewinddir(3), scandir(3),
       seekdir(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
       user-space interface documentation) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.9.1.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
       2024-06-26.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       [email protected]

Linux man-pages 6.9.1          2024-05-02                     telldir(3)

Pages that refer to this page: closedir(3)dirfd(3)opendir(3)readdir(3)rewinddir(3)scandir(3)seekdir(3)