Question

I’m a bit confused here. I wrote the following script to add files of a certain extension type to a List and it DOES work, just not for the root of C: Here’s the code first…

        // Create an empty list
        List<string> scanFiles = new List<string>();

        // Split possible extention list into array
        string[] scanExtensions = @"exe,com".Split(',');

        try
        {
            foreach (string extension in scanExtensions)
            {
                // Add collection for this filetype to the list of files
                scanFiles.AddRange(Directory.GetFiles("C:\\", "*." + extension, SearchOption.AllDirectories));
            }
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("ERROR: " + ex.Message);
        }

        // Display results
        foreach(string sf in scanFiles)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(sf);
        }

So if I run the above code, I get an error – but not the error I expect. It displays the following…

ERROR: Access to the path ‘C:\Documents and Settings\’ is denied.

I’d understand this if I hadn’t specified ‘C:\’ as the directory path! If I change this to any valid directory (such as C:\Program Files), the code works fine. Can anyone explain this?

Thanks,
Simon

Answer 1

SearchOption.AllDirectories means your code will drill down into (forbidden) territory.

Better be prepared to handle this kind of error. For a solution without catching exceptions you’ll need DirectoryInfo.GetFiles() to get FileInfo objects instead of strings and verify your access rights ahead of time.

But you will still need to handle exceptions (File/Dir not found) because of concurrency so you might as well forget about the FileInfos.