Re: using Linux getdents syscall

I'm not going to discuss what is more efficient, syscall or readdir. It is up to you to check and decide. I'll just try to give you some hints for the use of pack/unpack and/or Convert::Binary::C

Your first mistake, is the difference between actual size of buffer, and the declared size of buffer. You do my $buf = "\0" x 128; which reserves 128 bytes of buffer, but to the syscall you say that your buffer is BUF_SIZE long, which is 4096. You'll end up with corrupted memory, or even SEGFAULT.

Then, you have to check for syscall returning 0. In this case, there's nothing to unpack.

Finally. Returned buffer shall contain one or more records of variable length. You have to configure Convert::Binary::C so that it is prepared to handle such records. Read "The Dimension Tag" section in the module documentation. So your algorithm shall be "while $read != 0 convert first structure; $read -= length of converted; remove processed part from buffer".

You don't have to use Convert::Binary::C. Using perls native "unpack" you can process this structure like this

while($read != 0)
{
    my($ino, $off, $len, $name) = unpack("LLSZ*", $buf);
    print $name, "\n" if($ino != 0);
    substr($buf, 0, $len) = '';
    $read -= $len;
}
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Re^2: using Linux getdents syscall by glasswalk3r (Friar) on Nov 24, 2015 at 12:18 UTC
Thanks for the tips! Considering that `$buf` might have multiple dentries inside of it, how do I navigate thru all those records? For C is easy because I'm accessing memory directly, but how do I know how many bytes I should read from `$buf` and how to move to the next record with Perl? Alceu Rodrigues de Freitas Junior --------------------------------- "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Sir Winston Churchill	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: using Linux getdents syscall by andal (Hermit) on Nov 25, 2015 at 07:50 UTC
I've already put it in the code. The variable $len contains total length of single dirent structure. So, all you have to do is to remove this many bytes from the beginning of the buffer.	[reply]
Re^2: using Linux getdents syscall by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jul 17, 2020 at 19:34 UTC
For `unsigned long`, you should use `L!`, not `L`. For `unsigned short`, you should use `S!`, not `S`. Ref	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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