Question

I have a Java program that is supplied a directory name, gets a list of all the file in that directory using dirName.listFiles() and then iterates through every file parsing information from them.

The files would normally all just be normal text files, but I am using SVN and there seems to be a directory called .svn in my dirName directory which is causing my program to fail because .svn is a directory and not a text file.

Now, I could implement filters using a FileFilter object, but I would really only expect text files to be in that directory in the final program.

My question is: Is there a way round my issue without using a FileFilter? I also think that my program is ignoring the .svn directory in other programs that I’ve written, so I’m not sure why it’s an issue now.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You would have this issue with many version control systems (not just SVN) as some of them have files on disk that help identify where the working copy comes from (.svn for SVN, view.dat for clearcase). You really should just implement a FileFilter to exclude those, or use the ones from commons-io:

makeSvnAware

It’s null safe, so if you give it null input, it simply returns an svn filter for you. If you give it another IOFileFilter (a subinterface of FileFilter) it simply returns one that does an AND between the existing filter and the svn filter.

FileFilter svnFilter = FileFilterUtils.makeSvnAware(null);