Question

I am currently working on a c# program where I check the creation time of a file and delete it if the file is older than 2 days. I have the following code snippet that should be achieving this.

DateTime creationTime = file.CreationTime.Date;
if (creationTime < DateTime.Now.AddDays(-logAge) && file.Name != currentLog)
{
    File.Delete(string.Format("{0}/{1}", directory, file));
}

While my program is running it is constantly creating new files and a separate thread checks that the files are no older than say 2 days. If I have my PC’s date set to the 24th April the files are created and kept as expected, if I then change the PC’s date to the 25th April I would expect the files to remain as they are not older than 2 days, however, this is not the case as they are being deleted.

Log age is set to so I wouldn’t have expected files to be deleted until after I had changed the date to be the 26th April.

What am I doing wrong, I’ve looked at many examples including another question on Stackoverflow Delete files older than 3 months old in a directory using .NET but its not doing what I would expect it to.

Answer 1

file.Delete does make more sense than File.Delete(path) and Path.Combine() makes a lot more sense than using string.Format.

I’ve stumbled across this answer, don’t know why I didn’t find it before hand after spending ages on google, but this appears to have fixed the problem. DateTime.Compare how to check if a date is less than 30 days old?. The other problem was that I was using the file creation time but for my scenario it made more sense to use lastWriteTime.date.