How to delete all files in a folder, but not delete the folder using NIX standard libraries?

Question

I am trying to create a program that deletes the contents of the /tmp folder, I am using C/C++ on linux.

system("exec rm -r /tmp") 

deletes everything in the folder but it deletes the folder too which I dont want.

Is there any way to do this by some sort of bash script, called via system(); or is there a direct way i can do this in C/C++?

My question is similar to this one, but im not on OS X... how to delete all files in a folder, but not the folder itself?

Answer 1

#include <stdio.h> #include <dirent.h>  int main() {     // These are data types defined in the "dirent" header     DIR *theFolder = opendir("path/of/folder");     struct dirent *next_file;     char filepath[256];      while ( (next_file = readdir(theFolder)) != NULL )     {         // build the path for each file in the folder         sprintf(filepath, "%s/%s", "path/of/folder", next_file->d_name);         remove(filepath);     }     closedir(theFolder);     return 0; } 

You don't want to spawn a new shell via system() or something like that - that's a lot of overhead to do something very simple and it makes unnecessary assumptions (and dependencies) about what's available on the system.

Answer 2

In C/C++, you could do:

system("exec rm -r /tmp/*") 

In Bash, you could do:

rm -r /tmp/* 

This will delete everything inside /tmp, but not /tmp itself.