Probably better to explicitly ignore "." and ".." than to blithely do two dummy reads; I'm not aware of anything that mandates that those are the first results returned by a readdir (then again I don't know of any offhand where it isn't either, just it seems more portable to ignore them on the off chance and increase your portability (on the third hand, it's entirely possible that said system would have not-cwd-or-parent entries which are named "." and ".." that you might not want to ignore . . . :)).
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