Hi I am very new to C++ programming having just finished my training. I live in the UK and am trying to learn coding in C++ so that I can develop my career prospects. You may be seeing a lot of posts from me over the next few months so please bear with me.

I have been given a task which I would really appreciate some help with.
None of my initial training contained info on how look at filesystems, only how to edit the contents of a file, therefore I haven't clue where to start

The program needs to run from the command prompt, not from a GUI.

I need to compare the contents of an entire directory structure who's source location has been hard coded into the program (C:\temp1\test1)
to an identical directory structure on a different drive who's letter I am manually prompted to enter, in this case (I:\temp1\test1)

I need to be able to compare all files in the source directory against all files in the destination. If there is a new file added to the source it needs to be copied to the destination. If a file has been deleted from the source it need to be deleted from the destination. Also needs to copy accross from the source any file who's modification date is newer than the file in the destination, and Finally if there has been a directory deleted or created or had it's name changed in the source, that change needs to be reflected in the destination too.

Phew, hope that all makes sense. I suppose you could say it is like a backup that only amends the destination tree to reflect any change in the source tree.

Many thanks in advance for any help that is offered. I wish I had started on something a little less confusing.....

Check out _findfirst and the _findnext functions.

-Shane

Good suggestion, although there may be portability/compatibility issues with those functions.

How you deal with directories depends upon the platform you are on. For some reason or another no one on the standards commitee thought dealing with directories was very usefull (my bet is that they were all embedded systems gurus) and left it ous of the standard.

There are findfirst() (_findfirst()) and (_findnext()) in some libraries.

On windows you can use FindFirstFile() and FindNextFile() from the win32 API. I am not sure how to do it on a UNIX or MAC platform.