Question

I’m running the code below and getting exception below. Am I forced to put this function in try catch or is there other way to get all directories recursively?
I could write my own recursive function to get files and directory. But I wonder if there is a better way.

// get all files in folder and sub-folders
var d = Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\", "*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

// get all sub-directories
var dirs = Directory.GetDirectories(@"C:\", "*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

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

Answer 1

If you want to continue with the next folder after a fail, then yea; you’ll have to do it yourself. I would recommend a Stack<T> (depth first) or Queue<T> (bredth first) rather than recursion, and an iterator block (yield return); then you avoid both stack-overflow and memory usage issues.

Example:

    public static IEnumerable<string> GetFiles(string root, string searchPattern)
    {
        Stack<string> pending = new Stack<string>();
        pending.Push(root);
        while (pending.Count != 0)
        {
            var path = pending.Pop();
            string[] next = null;
            try
            {
                next = Directory.GetFiles(path, searchPattern);                    
            }
            catch { }
            if(next != null && next.Length != 0)
                foreach (var file in next) yield return file;
            try
            {
                next = Directory.GetDirectories(path);
                foreach (var subdir in next) pending.Push(subdir);
            }
            catch { }
        }
    }