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C++ Cookbook
book

C++ Cookbook

by D. Ryan Stephens, Christopher Diggins, Jonathan Turkanis, Jeff Cogswell
November 2005
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
594 pages
16h 23m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from C++ Cookbook

10.12. Reading the Contents of a Directory

Problem

You need to read the contents of a directory, most likely to do something to each file or subdirectory that’s in it.

Solution

To write something portable, use the Boost Filesystem library’s classes and functions. It provides a number of handy utilities for manipulating files, such as a portable path representation, directory iterators, and numerous functions for renaming, deleting, and copying files, and so on. Example 10-19 demonstrates how to use a few of these facilities.

Example 10-19. Reading a directory

#include <iostream>
#include <boost/filesystem/operations.hpp>
#include <boost/filesystem/fstream.hpp>

using namespace boost::filesystem;

int main(int argc, char** argv) {

   if (argc < 2) {
      std::cerr << "Usage: " << argv[0] << " [dir name]\n";
      return(EXIT_FAILURE);
   }

   path fullPath =    // Create the full, absolute path name
     system_complete(path(argv[1], native));

   if (!exists(fullPath)) {
      std::cerr << "Error: the directory " << fullPath.string()
                << " does not exist.\n";
      return(EXIT_FAILURE);
   }

   if (!is_directory(fullPath)) {
      std::cout << fullPath.string() << " is not a directory!\n";
      return(EXIT_SUCCESS);
   }

   directory_iterator end;
   for (directory_iterator it(fullPath);
        it != end; ++it) {               // Iterate through each
                                         // element in the dir,
      std::cout << it->leaf();           // almost as you would
      if (is_directory(*it))             // an STL container
         std::cout << " (dir)";
      std::cout << '\n';
   }

   return(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

Discussion

Like creating or deleting directories ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007612Supplemental ContentErrata Page