Question

I am looking for a built-in functionality in .NET to query folders with relative paths and wildcards, similar to Powershell’s dir command (also known as ls). As far as I remember, Powershell returns an array of DirectoryInfo and FileInfo .NET objects, which can later be used for processing. Example input:

..\bin\Release\XmlConfig\*.xml

would translate into several FileInfo‘s of XML files.

Is there anything like that in .NET?

Answer 1

System.IO.Directory is the static class that provides that functionality.

For instance your example would be:

using System.IO;

bool searchSubfolders = false;
foreach (var filePath in Directory.EnumerateFiles(@"..\bin\Release\XmlConfig",
                                                  "*.xml", searchSubfolders))
{
    var fileInfo = new FileInfo(filePath); //If you prefer
    //Do something with filePath
}

A more complex example would be: (note this isn’t really tested very thoroughly, for instance ending a string with \ would cause it to error)

var searchPath = @"c:\appname\bla????\*.png";
//Get the first search character
var firstSearchIndex = searchPath.IndexOfAny(new[] {'?', '*'});
if (firstSearchIndex == -1) firstSearchIndex = searchPath.Length;
//Get the clean part of the path
var cleanEnd = searchPath.LastIndexOf('\\', firstSearchIndex);
var cleanPath = searchPath.Substring(0, cleanEnd);
//Get the dirty parts of the path
var splitDirty = searchPath.Substring(cleanEnd + 1).Split('\\');

//You now have an array of search parts, all but the last should be ran with Directory.EnumerateDirectories.
//The last with Directory.EnumerateFiles
//I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.