Advanced UNIX Programming

Restoring Position Within a Directory

In order to position the directory randomly according to information saved from a prior call to telldir(3), the function seekdir(3) must be used to restore the directory position. The function synopsis is as follows:

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <dirent.h>

void seekdir(DIR *dirp, long loc);

The seekdir(3) function simply accepts the pointer to an open DIR structure and an offset loc to restore as a directory position. No success or error indication is returned for this call.

The following example shows how telldir(3) and seekdir(3) can be used together:

 DIR *dirp; /* Open DIR pointer */ long dirpos; /* Directory offset */ dirpos = telldir(dirp); /* Get offset in directory */ … seekdir(dirpos); /* Restore ...