How do I list subdirectories in Windows using C++?

Question

how do I list subdirectories in windows using C++? Using code that would run cross-platorm is better.

Answer 1

Here's a relatively good solution that should work cross platform. You'll have to change the section of the code where you want it to do something but otherwise it should work quite well.

#include <cstring>
#include <io.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <stdio.h>

using namespace std;

void list(char* dir)
{
    char originalDirectory[_MAX_PATH];

    // Get the current directory so we can return to it
    _getcwd(originalDirectory, _MAX_PATH);

    _chdir(dir);  // Change to the working directory
    _finddata_t fileinfo;

    // This will grab the first file in the directory
    // "*" can be changed if you only want to look for specific files
    intptr_t handle = _findfirst("*", &fileinfo);

    if(handle == -1)  // No files or directories found
    {
        perror("Error searching for file");
        exit(1);
    }

    do
    {
        if(strcmp(fileinfo.name, ".") == 0 || strcmp(fileinfo.name, "..") == 0)
            continue;
        if(fileinfo.attrib & _A_SUBDIR) // Use bitmask to see if this is a directory
            cout << "This is a directory." << endl;
        else
            cout << "This is a file." << endl;
    } while(_findnext(handle, &fileinfo) == 0);

    _findclose(handle); // Close the stream

    _chdir(originalDirectory);
}

int main()
{
    list("C:\\");
    return 0;
}

This is pretty concise code and will list all sub-directories and files in the directory. If you want to have it list all the contents in each sub-directory, you can recursively call the function by passing in the sub-directory on the line that prints out "This is a directory." Something like list(fileinfo.name); should do the trick.