CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netfilefile-io
Bhaskar
Bhaskar

Reputation: 1690

Difference between in doing file copy/delete and Move

What is difference between

  1. Copying a file and deleting it using File.Copy() and File.Delete()
  2. Moving the file using File.Move()

In terms of permission required to do these operations is there any difference? Any help much appreciated.

Upvotes: 13

Views: 18009

Answers (4)

Sebastian Mach
Sebastian Mach

Reputation: 39089

Performance wise, if on one and the same file system, moving a file is (in simplified terms) just adjusting some internal registers of the file system itself (possibly adjusting some nodes in a red/black-tree), without actually moving something.

Imagine you have 180MiB to move, and you can write onto your disk at roughly 30MiB/s. Then with copy/delete, it takes approximately 6 seconds to finish. With a simple move [same file system], it goes so fast you might not even realise it.

(I once wrote some transactional file system helpers that would move or copy multiple files, all or none; in order to make the commit as fast as possible, I moved/copied all stuff into a temporary sub-folder first, and then the final commit would move existent data into another folder (to enable rollback), and the new data up to the target).

Upvotes: 4

Saeed Neamati
Saeed Neamati

Reputation: 35822

Permission in file transfer is checked at two points: source, and destination. So, if you don't have read permission in source folder, or you don't have write permission in destination, then these methods both throw AccessDeniedException exception. In other words, permission checking is agnostic to method in use.

Upvotes: 0

Ghlouw
Ghlouw

Reputation: 1460

I don't think there is any difference permission-wise, but I would personally prefer to use File.Move() since then you have both actions happening in the same "transaction". In other words if something on the move fails the whole operation fails. However, if you break it up in two steps (copy + delete) if copy worked and delete failed, you would have to reverse the "transaction" (delete the copy) manually.

Upvotes: 0

Pranay Rana
Pranay Rana

Reputation: 176896

File.Move method can be used to move the file from one path to another. This method works across disk volumes, and it does not throw an exception if the source and destination are the same.

You cannot use the Move method to overwrite an existing file. If you attempt to replace a file by moving a file of the same name into that directory, you get an IOException. To overcome this you can use the combination of Copy and Delete methods

Upvotes: 9

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