File Manager in C — Built on Raw System Calls

A dual-pane GTK3 file manager written in C, where every file operation is implemented directly on POSIX system calls (no high-level file libraries) — the point of the project was to use the OS interface itself, not wrap it.

┌──────────────┬──────────────┐
│  sidebar     │  path bar    │
│  favourites  ├──────────────┤
│              │  file list   │
│              │  (Treeview)  │
└──────────────┴──────────────┘
   right-click → context menu (copy / move / rename / delete / zip)

Operations → system calls

Operation	Implementation
List directory	opendir / readdir / closedir
File metadata (size, type, modified, inode)	stat
New folder	mkdir(path, 0755)
New file	open with O_CREAT
Move / rename	rename (atomic)
Delete (incl. recursive)	remove + nftw tree walk
Recursive copy	manual byte-wise open/read/write traversal
Compress folder to ZIP	libzip
Open with default app	system("open …") (macOS)

Build & run (macOS)

brew install gtk+3 libzip pkg-config
make
./filemanager

Layout

File	Purpose
main.c	GTK3 UI: sidebar, path bar, TreeView listing, context menu, dialogs
backend.c / backend.h	All file operations on POSIX syscalls + libzip
Makefile	Build (pkg-config based)

Notes

• Written for macOS with Homebrew GTK (Makefile points at /opt/homebrew); on Linux just install gtk+3/libzip through your package manager and drop the Homebrew include paths.
• Heavily commented — it doubles as a reference for how each syscall behaves.