Question

I’m trying to iterate through all the files on a certain level in the folder hierachy, more specifically, in all the sub-sub folders. Before I do actual operations on the files, I also want to count all the files to be able to show a progress bar. This means the iterating method must be called 2 times. This is the relevant code, I’m using now:

    Iterate(bool count)
    {
       foreach (string dir in Directory.GetDirectories(root))
          foreach (string subdir in Directory.GetDirectories(dir))
             foreach (string file in Directory.GetFiles(subdir))
             {
                if (count) progressBar.Maximum++;          
                else 
                {
                   //do operations
                }
             }
    }

I’m wondering if there’s a better way of doing this. Surely there must be a better way than adding a foreach for every folder level..?

Answer 1

It’d be easier to me to use LINQ here.

var files = 
    (from dir in Directory.GetDirectories(root)
     from subdir in Directory.GetDirectories(dir)
     from f in Directory.GetFiles(subdir)
     select f).ToList();

var fileCount = files.Length;
foreach (var f in files) {
    ...
}