Enumerating the content of a directory

So far in this chapter, we have looked at many of the functionalities provided by the filesystem library, such as working with paths, performing operations with files and directories (creating, moving, renaming, deleting, and so on), and querying or modifying properties. Another useful functionality when working with the filesystem is to iterate through the content of a directory. The filesystem library provides two directory iterators, one called directory_iterator, which iterates the content of a directory, and one called recursive_directory_iterator, which recursively iterates the content of a directory and its subdirectories. In this recipe, we will learn how to use them.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will consider a directory with the following structure:

test/
├──data/
│ ├──input.dat
│ └──output.dat
├──file_1.txt
├─...