Question

Developing search utility to search a file entire computer system, works fine on windows platform but becomes an infinite process in ubuntu linux. Please help to overcome this flaw. The following is the main part of the code.

public static void fun(File f){  // root directory is passed as argument
try{
   if(f.isDirectory()){
       File [] fi=f.listFiles();
       for(int i=0;i<fi.length;i++){
           if(fileFound==true) break;   // fileFound is boolean data type used as flag to indicate whether the file is found or not
           System.out.println(fi[i].getName());
           fun(fi[i]);
       }
   }
   else{
       if(f.getName().equalsIgnoreCase(txtFile.getText()) || 
         (f.getName().toLowerCase().startsWith(txtFile.getText().toLowerCase())) ||     
         (f.getName().toLowerCase().endsWith(txtFile.getText().toLowerCase()))){    
           l.setText("file found " + f.getAbsolutePath()); // l is JLabel that indicated prints the info like file found and its path
           fileFound=true;
       }
   }
}
catch(Exception e){
}
}

Answer 1

The error you are observing may be due to nested symbolic links.

The most effective approach to solve this problem would be to instead use FileUtils#iterateFiles from the excellent Apache Commons IO library.