Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.
- Create BookmarkCreate Bookmark
- Create Note or TagCreate Note or Tag
- DownloadDownload
- PrintPrint
Chapter 18. Directories and Links > File Tree Walking: nftw()
18.9. File Tree Walking: nftw()
The nftw() function allows a program to recursively walk through an entire directory subtree performing some operation (i.e., calling some programmer-defined function) for each file in the subtree.
Note:
The nftw() function is an enhancement of the older ftw() function, which performs a similar task. New applications should use nftw() (new ftw) because it provides more functionality, and predictable handling of symbolic links (SUSv3 permits ftw() either to follow or not follow symbolic links). SUSv3 specifies both nftw() and ftw(), but the latter function is marked obsolete in SUSv4.
The GNU C library also provides the BSD-derived fts API (fts_open(), fts_read(), fts_children(), fts_set(), and fts_close()). These functions perform a similar task to ftw() and nftw(), but offer greater flexibility to an application walking the tree. However, this API is not standardized and is provided on few UNIX implementations other than BSD descendants, so we omit discussion of it here.
