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opendir(3) Library Functions Manual opendir(3)
opendir, fdopendir - open a directory
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <dirent.h>
DIR *opendir(const char *name);
DIR *fdopendir(int fd);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see
feature_test_macros(7)):
fdopendir():
Since glibc 2.10:
_POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200809L
Before glibc 2.10:
_GNU_SOURCE
The opendir() function opens a directory stream corresponding to
the directory name, and returns a pointer to the directory stream.
The stream is positioned at the first entry in the directory.
The fdopendir() function is like opendir(), but returns a
directory stream for the directory referred to by the open file
descriptor fd. After a successful call to fdopendir(), fd is used
internally by the implementation, and should not otherwise be used
by the application.
The opendir() and fdopendir() functions return a pointer to the
directory stream. On error, NULL is returned, and errno is set to
indicate the error.
EACCES Permission denied.
EBADF fd is not a valid file descriptor opened for reading.
EMFILE The per-process limit on the number of open file
descriptors has been reached.
ENFILE The system-wide limit on the total number of open files has
been reached.
ENOENT Directory does not exist, or name is an empty string.
ENOMEM Insufficient memory to complete the operation.
ENOTDIR
name is not a directory.
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
attributes(7).
┌──────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
│ Interface │ Attribute │ Value │
├──────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
│ opendir(), fdopendir() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
└──────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘
POSIX.1-2008.
opendir()
SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.
fdopendir()
POSIX.1-2008. glibc 2.4.
Filename entries can be read from a directory stream using
readdir(3).
The underlying file descriptor of the directory stream can be
obtained using dirfd(3).
The opendir() function sets the close-on-exec flag for the file
descriptor underlying the DIR *. The fdopendir() function leaves
the setting of the close-on-exec flag unchanged for the file
descriptor, fd. POSIX.1-200x leaves it unspecified whether a
successful call to fdopendir() will set the close-on-exec flag for
the file descriptor, fd.
open(2), closedir(3), dirfd(3), readdir(3), rewinddir(3),
scandir(3), seekdir(3), telldir(3)
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⟩.
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Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 opendir(3)
Pages that refer to this page: close_range(2), execve(2), fanotify_mark(2), fork(2), open(2), closedir(3), dirfd(3), fts(3), getdirentries(3), glob(3), readdir(3), rewinddir(3), scandir(3), seekdir(3), telldir(3)