Recursive directory search in VB.NET

[blabello]

Good afternoon,

I'm currently in the process of designing an application that downloads a zipped directory, extracts it, recurses through the directory while searching for any files. If a file is found, it is moved to a new folder. I've gotten the code that will move the files working, but I'm having a lot of trouble recursing through the directory. My inexperience and lack of knowledge with VB is not helping.

My question, simply put, is how can I recurse through a directory and its subdirectories and search for any files they may contain?

[Plater]

The Directory object will allow you to recurse.

string[] filenames = System.IO.Directory.GetFiles("path","search pattern", System.IO.SearchOption.AllDirectories)
 

[blabello]

The Directory object will allow you to recurse.

string[] filenames = System.IO.Directory.GetFiles("path","search pattern", System.IO.SearchOption.AllDirectories)
 

Thanks for the prompt response. Could you kindly explain the function of the "search pattern" parameter?

-B. Labello

[Plater]

It works just like the dir command in a command prompt.
"*.txt" for all files that end in .txt
"M*.*" all files that start with M
etc
etc

[blabello]

Thanks for the help, Plater.

[Killer42]

The Directory object will allow you to recurse.

string[] filenames = System.IO.Directory.GetFiles("path","search pattern", System.IO.SearchOption.AllDirectories)
 

I'm curious whether this actually did resolve the issue. From another recent post, it seems as though GetFiles with the AllDirectories option doesn't give any indication of where the files were found, only their names. I suggested in the other thread that one could instead use GetDirectories to scan through the directories, and use a separate GetFiles for each, so you know where you are.

I can't try it out, as I've only got VB6.

[balabaster]

I'm curious whether this actually did resolve the issue. From another recent post, it seems as though GetFiles with the AllDirectories option doesn't give any indication of where the files were found, only their names.

The strings returned are the full path names... so even though there was no confirmation, I'm confident it provided everything needed.

A parse of my Inetpub\wwwroot folder with the all directories option selected returns an array with the following strings:

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Default.aspx
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\OnCall\Default.aspx
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\OnCall\OnCallEdit.aspx
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\OnCall\OnCallView.aspx
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\OnCall\PersonEdit.aspx
C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\OnCall\Admin\RebuildHierarchyFr omDB.aspx

Hope that clarifies things

[Killer42]

The strings returned are the full path names...

Thanks for that, balabaster.

That's really weird though. The problem encountered by the other person I mentioned was that it only provided the names with no paths, so they couldn't tell where the files came from. I admit, this did seem a surprising and pointless way for the function to operate. Perhaps it was a bug in some version that has since been fixed?

The workaround that I suggested apparently worked, but now I have no idea why it was needed.

[Plater]

There is an alternate call that returns FileInfo[] and if you did not use the correct combination of properties from THAT object, you would only get the name of the file, and not the directory hierarchy.