CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#
yeahumok
yeahumok

Reputation: 2952

Recursively getting files in a directory with several sub-directories

I was wondering if anybody here could help me out as I'm still very new to C#. I have a drive with folders w/in folders w/in folders that all contain files. Is there a way to recursively loop through the files and gather up all of these file names into a .txt file?

I'm not sure how to implement this into my Console app--so does anybody have any code that might help?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1566

Answers (4)

Jim Lamb
Jim Lamb

Reputation: 25775

Now that I understand that you want to prompt the user for each file found, you may want to try something along these lines:

class Program
{
    static IEnumerable<String> Visitor(String root, String searchPattern)
    {
        foreach (var file in Directory.GetFiles(root, searchPattern, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly))
        {
            yield return file;
        }

        foreach (var folder in Directory.GetDirectories(root))
        {
            foreach (var file in Visitor(folder, searchPattern))
                yield return file;
        }
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        foreach (var file in Visitor(args[0], args[1]))
        {
            Console.Write("Process {0}? (Y/N) ", file);

            if (Console.ReadKey().Key == ConsoleKey.Y)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("{1}\tProcessing {0}...", file, Environment.NewLine);
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine();
            }
        }
    }
}

That will walk the directory structure and, for each match, prompt the user whether to process the file or not.

Upvotes: 4

Software.Developer
Software.Developer

Reputation: 999

Something like this maybe?

        var files = Directory.GetFiles("c:\\", "*.*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);
        using (var sw = new StreamWriter("output.txt"))
        {
            files.ToList().ForEach(file => sw.WriteLine(file));
        }

Don't forget to Using System.IO

Upvotes: 3

Mark Rushakoff
Mark Rushakoff

Reputation: 258128

The C# Programming Guide has an article detailing both a recursive and an iterative approach to walk through a directory tree.

@Koen's answer is more useful in general, but the approaches in that article can be useful if you need a more "asynchronous" approach, where you update the UI (or whatever) each time you find a matching file. With the other approach, you either have all the files or you don't.

Upvotes: 3

Koen
Koen

Reputation: 3686

File.WriteAllLines("yourfile.txt", Directory.GetFiles("path", "*.*", SearchOption.AllDirectories));

Upvotes: 9

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