CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#windows
prongs
prongs

Reputation: 9606

Deleting multiple files with wildcard

You know that in linux it's easy but I can't just understand how to do it in C# on Windows. I want to delete all files matching the wildcard f*.txt. How do I go about going that?

Upvotes: 93

Views: 73899

Answers (4)

s1cart3r
s1cart3r

Reputation: 354

I appreciate this thread is a little old now, but if you want to use linq then

Directory.GetFiles("f:\\TestData", "*.zip", SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly).ToList().ForEach(File.Delete);

Upvotes: 5

Ry-
Ry-

Reputation: 224905

You can use the DirectoryInfo.EnumerateFiles function:

var dir = new DirectoryInfo(directoryPath);

foreach (var file in dir.EnumerateFiles("f*.txt")) {
    file.Delete();
}

(Of course, you'll probably want to add error handling.)

Upvotes: 155

Brian Cryer
Brian Cryer

Reputation: 2226

I know this has already been answered and with a good answer, but there is an alternative in .NET 4.0 and higher. Use Directory.EnumerateFiles(), thus:

foreach (string f in Directory.EnumerateFiles(myDirectory,"f*.txt"))
{
    File.Delete(f);
}

The disadvantage of DirectoryInfo.GetFiles() is that it returns a list of files - which 99.9% of the time is great. The disadvantage is if the folder contains tens of thousands of files (which is rare) then it becomes very slow and enumerating through the matching files is much faster.

Upvotes: 80

keyboardP
keyboardP

Reputation: 69372

You can use the Directory.GetFiles method with the wildcard overload. This will return all the filenames that match your pattern. You can then delete these files.

Upvotes: 8

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