storing references of children's of a directory

Question

In a project, the program must store references/identifiers of each child of a directory in its variables(say a stack). i.e the program must not perform pathlookup again for every child once a directory is read.

I am not very sure how to do that. Because if inode numbers are stored, the corresponding file/directory cannot be accessed by the inode right?

Will be gratefull for some pointers

Thanks

Edit: My reasons for "must not perform pathlookup again".....a thread is reading the file system tree in a depth first manner and when it reads a directory...identifiers of its children are saved to follow it in a depth first manner again. Why I save the indentifiers is because a directory that has been read may be moved to another part of the file system by a concurrent thread and the subtree under the moved directory may not be read as that part of the tree has already been traversed.

Answer 1

This smells like homework, except there didn't used to be a way to do this; it is possible now, but only by using the fairly new openat system call and its friends (see the "see also" list at the bottom of that manpage). You are correct that you cannot open a file by its inode number; but using the *at functions, you can open a file by name relative to a directory that you have an open file descriptor (not a DIR*) for.