Question

I wrote a method that needed to find all files within a path, and I want to get all the files using recursion. Here’s my current method:

public void doStart(DirectoryInfo dir, string filePattern)
        {
            try
            {
                foreach (FileInfo fileInfo in dir.GetFiles(filePattern))
                {
                    if (fileFound != null)
                    {
                        fileFound(fileInfo);
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {

            }

            try
            {
                foreach (DirectoryInfo dirInfo in dir.GetDirectories())
                {
                    doStart(dirInfo, filePattern);
                }
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {

            }
        }

        public void Start(string path, string filePattern)
        {
            doStart(new DirectoryInfo(path), filePattern);
        }

Is there is better way to write this kind of recursion or is this good enough ?

Answer 1

Try something like this:

string[] filePaths = Directory.GetFiles(@dir, "*.filetype", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

This would recursively look through the directory, finding all files with a certain filetype (‘.filetype’) and returns a string array containing all found files.

Also, I’d recommend not to use empty catch blocks, as your application won’t let you know if something went wrong. Either show a message box (or something similar) or log it to a database or something.

Further, what would your DoStart() method do if there is a subdirectory in a subdirectory? From what I’m seeing, I’d say it only searches on 1 sublevel.