UPDATE 2017:
In C++17 there is now an official way to list files of your file system: std::filesystem
. There is an excellent answer from Shreevardhan below with this source code (This code may throw):
#include <string> #include <iostream> #include <filesystem> namespace fs = std::filesystem; int main() { std::string path = "/path/to/directory"; for (const auto & entry : fs::directory_iterator(path)) std::cout << entry.path() << std::endl; }
Old Answer:
In small and simple tasks I do not use boost, I use dirent.h. It is available as a standard header in UNIX, and also available for Windows via a compatibility layer created by Toni Ronkko.
DIR *dir; struct dirent *ent; if ((dir = opendir ("c:\\src\\")) != NULL) { /* print all the files and directories within directory */ while ((ent = readdir (dir)) != NULL) { printf ("%s\n", ent->d_name); } closedir (dir); } else { /* could not open directory */ perror (""); return EXIT_FAILURE; }
It is just a small header file and does most of the simple stuff you need without using a big template-based approach like boost(no offence, I like boost!).