I’m using the Windows API calls FindFirstFile and FindNextFile to search for files matching a certain wildcard string in a directory. For example, I might want to find all XML files in a directory, and so I search using the pattern “*.xml”.
I’m running into the problem that if I’m searching for a 3-letter extension, and a file’s extension starts with that 3-letter extension, it will get picked up by my search, even if the extension contains more characters after those first 3. For example, if my file is named somelongname.xmlaaaa, this will get picked up by the search for “*.xml”. The short name of that file is somelo~1.xml, which matches my wildcard string.
I could do my own wildcard matching to get around this problem, but presumably a Windows API would be able to do this more efficiently than I could, and my code would be simpler. As far as I can tell there isn’t a way to force these functions to ignore short names. Is there any API Windows exposes with this functionality?
Unfortunately, the documentation JoeFish found in his answer turns out to be a little misleading. The search will still find files that match the short name, even if you pass in FindExInfoBasic. It just won’t include the short file name in the cAlternateFileName member of the WIN32_FIND_DATA structure.
I did however find that there’s a Windows function PathMatchSpec that will do the same wildcard matching against a supplied string. So, I was able to add a second step to my searching that verifies that the long name matches the pattern. It’s even available in Windows XP.