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

  use IO::Dirent;

  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";

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!

IO::Dirent exports the following symbols by default:

    readdirent

The following tags may be exported to your namespace:

    ALL

which includes readdirent 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.

This was written on FreeBSD which implements 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.

• For platforms that do not implement a dirent struct with file type, do a stat on the entry and populate the structure anyway.
• Consider making readdirent return a list of objects instead of a list of hashrefs. Nah...
• Do some memory profiling (I'm not sure if I have any leaks or not).

Copyright 2002 Scott Wiersdorf.

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

Scott Wiersdorf, <scott@perlcode.org>

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

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

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.