To begin I'm sorry for my english :) I looking for a way to create a thread each time my program finds a directory, in order to call the program itself but with a new argv[2] argument (which is the current dir). I did it successfully with fork() but with pthread I've some difficulties. I don't know if I can do something like that : #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/stat.h> #include <sys/wait.h> #include <dirent.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { pthread_t threadID[10] = {0}; DIR * dir; struct dirent * entry; struct stat status; pthread_attr_t attr; pthread_attr_init(&attr); int i = 0; char *res; char *tmp; char *file; if(argc != 3) { printf("Usage : %s <file> <dir>\n", argv[0]); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } if(stat(argv[2],&status) == 0) { dir = opendir(argv[2]); file = argv[1]; } else exit(EXIT_FAILURE); while ((entry = readdir(dir))) { if (strcmp(entry->d_name, ".") && strcmp(entry->d_name, "..")) { tmp = malloc(strlen(argv[2]) + strlen(entry->d_name) + 2); strcpy(tmp, argv[2]); strcat(tmp, "/"); strcat(tmp, entry->d_name); stat(tmp, &status); if (S_ISDIR(status.st_mode)) { argv[2] = tmp; pthread_create( &threadID[i], &attr, execvp(argv[0], argv), NULL); printf("New thread created : %d", i); i++; } else if (!strcmp(entry->d_name, file)) { printf(" %s was found - Thread number = %d\n",tmp, i); break; } free(tmp); } } pthread_join( threadID[i] , &res ); exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); } Actually it doesn't works : pthread_create( &threadID[i], &attr, execvp(argv[0], argv), NULL); I have no runtime error, but when the file to find is in another directory, the thread is not created and so execvp(argv[0], argv) is not called... Thank you for you help, Simon