title: Efficiently Traverse Directory Tree with opendir(), readdir() and closedir()
body: <p>The C routines opendir(), readdir() and closedir() provide a way for me to traverse a directory structure. However, each dirent structure returned by readdir() does not seem to provide a useful way for me to obtain the set of pointers to DIR that I would need to recurse into the directory subdirectories.</p>
  
  <p>Of course, they give me the name of the files, so I could either append that name to the directory path and stat() and opendir() them, or I could change the current working directory of the process via chdir() and roll it back via chdir("..").</p>
  
  <p>The problem with the first approach is that if the length of the directory path is great enough, then the cost to pass a string containing it to opendir() will overweight the cost of opening a directory. If you are a bit more theoretical, you could say your complexity could increase beyond linear time (in the total character count of the (relative) filenames in the directory tree).</p>
  
  <p>Also, the second approach has a problem. Since each process has a single current working directory, all but one thread will have to block in a multithreaded application. Also, I don't know if the current working directory is just a mere convenience (i.e., the relative path will be appended to it prior to a filesystem query). If it is, this approach will be inefficient too.</p>
  
  <p>I am accepting alternatives to these functions. So how is it one can traverse a UNIX directory tree efficiently (linear time in the total character count of the files under it)?</p>