In this article we will look into how to perform basic operation with directory in C#
Working
with Directory in C#
In this article, we will see how to work with
directory in C#. .NET framework has a great
namespace called System.IO which gives an option to work with I/O system
like file and directory. Lets learn input and output first.
Input and output
(I/O) streaming is a process of reading data from and writing data to a storage medium. In the .NET
Framework, the System.IO namespace and its sub namespaces contain the classes and other
types to perform I/O operations. The Directory class
in the .NET Framework class library provides static methods for creating,reading, copying, moving, and deleting
directories. In this article we will see all those
operation one by one.
Create
a Directory
Creating a directory is
very easy. the Directory.CreateDirectory method creates a directory in the
specified path with the specified Windows security. You can also create a
directory on a remote computer. The
following code snippet creates a Temp folder in C:\ drive if the directory exists already.
string root = @"C:\Sourav";
string subdir = @"C:\sourav\Kayal";
// If directory does not
exist, create it.
if (!Directory.Exists(root))
{
Directory.CreateDirectory(root);
}
Within if condition, we are checking whether directory
already exists or not using
Directory.Exists() function.
Deleting
a directory
The Directory.Delete
method deletes an empty directory from the specified path permanently. If a directory has sub directories and/or files, you must delete them before you can delete a directory. If you try to delete a file that is not
empty, you will get an error message. The following code
snippet deletes the destination file.
string root = @"C:\Sourav";
// If directory does
not exist, don't even try
if (Directory.Exists(root))
{
Directory.Delete(root);
}
The following code snippet
checks if a directory has subdirectories and files and delete them before
deleting a directory.
Move
a directory in C#
If we want we can move directory from one location to another location. The
Directory.Move method moves an existing directory to a new specified directory
with full path. The Move method takes
two parameters. The Move method deletes the original directory.
The following code
snippet moves the source directory to the destination directory.
string sourceDirName = @"D:\Sourav";
string destDirName = @"D:\NewSourav";
try
{
Directory.Move(sourceDirName, destDirName);
}
catch (IOException exp)
{
Console.WriteLine(exp.Message);
}
Here my source directory is in D:Sourav and new
directory is D:NewSourav. Display creation time of directory
Get
and Set File Creation Time
It’s very easy to find directory information from any directory using c#.
The Directory.SetCreationTime and Directory.GetCreationTime
methods are used to set and get the creation date and
time of the specified directory. The following code snippet sets and gets the creation time of
a directory.
string root = @"C:\sourav";
// Get and Set Creation time
Directory.SetCreationTime(root, DateTime.Now);
DateTime CreationTime = Directory.GetCreationTime(root);
Console.WriteLine(CreationTime);
In output it will show creation date time of
directory.
Find
all files from Directory
It’s rely easy to
find all files from any directory what you think, the GetFiles() method gets a
list of files in the specified directory.
string root = @"C:\Sourav";
string[] fileEntries = Directory.GetFiles(root);
foreach (string fileName in fileEntries)
Console.WriteLine(fileName);
In output it will show all file name within Sourav
Directory.
Conclusion:
In this article we looked into how simple
directory operation in C# can be performed. Hope this will help to beginner.