Question

I’m working on a program that acts much like dropbox but locally for my business. I have it setup where some users can’t write to some files/directories but they can still write locally. It’s not a huge problem, I can just redownload the file/directory but it would be nice if I could just lock it. (they would still need read though)

Answer 1

I suggest you set the Read Only Attribute using the File.SetAttributes method.

To Set the file as Read Only:

File.SetAttributes(@"C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\file.txt", FileAttributes.ReadOnly);

To Set the file back to normal:

File.SetAttributes(@"C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\file.txt", FileAttributes.Normal);

You can check to see if the file is read only, and then throw an error :

System.IO.FileInfo fileInfo = new System.IO.FileInfo(@"C:\Users\Owner\Desktop\file.txt");
if (fileInfo.IsReadOnly)
{
    //...Alert user that this file cannot be deleted
}
else
{
    //... Delete the file here
}