> 
> **Possible Duplicate:**  
> 
> [zero length arrays](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4690718/zero-length-arrays) 
> 
> 
> 

Recently, I've been reading the FUSE source code and the `dirent struct` is defined as follows:

```
struct fuse_dirent
{
    __u64 ino;
    __u64 off;
    __u32 namelen;
    __u32 type;
    char name[0];
}

```

Can anyone explain what `name[0]` means here? What is it for? For padding and alignment?