Hello, I'm writing a FUSE plugin in C. I'm keeping track of data structures in the filesystem through structs like:

typedef struct {
    block_number_t inode;
    filename_t filename; //char[SOME_SIZE]
    some_other_field_t other_field;
} fs_directory_table_item_t;

Obviously, I have to read (write) these structs from (to) disk at some point. I could treat the struct as a sequence of bytes and do something like this:

read(disk_fd, directory_table_item, sizeof(fs_directory_table_item_t));

...except that cannot possibly work as filename is actually a pointer to the char array.

I'd really like to avoid having to write code like:

read(disk_df, *directory_table_item.inode,       sizeof(block_number_t));
read(disk_df,  directory_table_item.filename,    sizeof(filename_t));
read(disk_df, *directory_table_item.other_field, sizeof(some_other_field_t));

...for each struct in the code, because I'd have to replicate code and changes in no less than three different places (definition, reading, writing).

Any DRYer but still maintainable ideas?