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While playing with ctypes a bit, I noticed a feature that doesn't appear to be documented. Suppose I import the readdir_r function (assuming DIRENT is a correctly declared ctypes.Structure):
DIR_p = c_void_p
DIRENT_p = POINTER(DIRENT)
DIRENT_pp = POINTER(DIRENT_p)
readdir_r = lib.readdir_r
readdir_r.argtypes = [DIR_p, DIRENT_p, DIRENT_pp]
readdir_r.restype = c_int
It seems that I can then call it as follows:
dirent = DIRENT()
result = DIRENT_p()
readdir_r(dir_fd, dirent, result)
Note that while readdir_r takes DIRENT_p and DIRENT_pp as its second and third args, I pass in just DIRENT and DIRENT_p, accordingly. What I should have done is use byref() on both, but ctypes seems to have some magic applied when argtypes declares pointer types. If I use byref, it still works. However, if I keep the same call and comment out the argtypes declaration, I get a segfault.
This behavior of ctypes should be documented.