I think I gave up, I tried every thing and read all I can, I am not able to print out the full path for files in a given directroy, here is another try, cann't figure out whats wrong. any idea why? thanks #include "/usr/include/boost/filesystem/operations.hpp" #include "/usr/include/boost/filesystem/fstream.hpp" #include "/usr/include/boost/filesystem/path.hpp" #include <iostream> #include <string> namespace fs = boost::filesystem; int main(){ fs::path full_path( fs::initial_path() ); char* some_path = "/home/sam/"; full_path = fs::system_complete( fs::path( some_path, fs::native ) ); fs::directory_iterator end_itr; for ( fs::directory_iterator itr( full_path ); itr != end_itr; ++itr ) { std::cout << full_path.native_file_string() << std::endl; } } __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail