Question

In C#, if I have a directory path and a relative file path with wildcard, e.g.

"c:\foo\bar" and "..\blah\*.cpp"

Is there a simple way to get the list of absolute file paths? e.g.

{ "c:\foo\blah\a.cpp", "c:\foo\blah\b.cpp" }

Background

There is a source code tree, where any directory can contain a build definition file. This file uses relative paths with wildcards to specify a list of source files. The task is to generate a list of absolute paths of all source files for each one of these build definition files.

Answer 1

You can get the absolute path first and then enumerate the files inside the directory matching the wildcard:

// input
string rootDir = @"c:\foo\bar"; 
string originalPattern = @"..\blah\*.cpp";

// Get directory and file parts of complete relative pattern
string pattern = Path.GetFileName (originalPattern); 
string relDir = originalPattern.Substring ( 0, originalPattern.Length - pattern.Length );
// Get absolute path (root+relative)
string absPath = Path.GetFullPath ( Path.Combine ( rootDir ,relDir ) );

// Search files mathing the pattern
string[] files = Directory.GetFiles ( absPath, pattern, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly );