Question

I am trying to delete a file, but the following code doesn’t do that. It doesn’t throw an exception, but the file is still there. Is that possible?

try
{
    File.Delete(@"C:\File.txt");
} 
catch(Exception e)
{
    Console.WriteLine(e);
}

If the file can’t be deleted, the exception should print out, but it doesn’t. Should this fail silently (as in the File.Delete method is swallowing any errors)?

Answer 1

File.Delete does not throw an exception if the specified file does not exist. [Some previous versions of the MSDN documentation incorrectly stated that it did].

try 
{ 
    string filename = @"C:\File.txt";
    if (File.Exists(filename))
    { 
        File.Delete(filename);
    }
    else
    {
        Debug.WriteLine("File does not exist.");
    } 
}  
catch(Exception e) 
{ 
    Console.WriteLine(e); 
}