FileSystemEnumerable

C# class that enumerates files in a folder search without terminating when exceptions occur

Introduction

This class was initially posted to StackOverflow.com as an answer to StackOverflow. I posted the code to facilitate broader access by the community. It searches a directory tree, either recursively or just the top level, and fetches the file system information for all the files and that it finds. If an exception is thrown along the way, either because of access denied or some other cause, the file is skipped and the enumration continues. This is to work around the rather annoying behavior of, e.g., Directory.EnumerateFiles etc, which give up the first time they encounter an exception.

Changelog

29 Jan 2019 Brian Hart

• Ran a code cleanup (format, remove and sort usings) on the FileSystemEnumerable.cs file.
• Commented out all calls to ILog so that this code does not have log4net as a dependency.

26 Jan 2019 Brian Hart

• Added two overloads of a static Search method so that you can use it in a foreach in a more fluent way.
• Test for the non-existence of the root directory and also I set defaults for the pattern and option parameters.

The usage is below (note that this is excerpted from the Stack Overflow post linked above):

var root = new DirectoryInfo(@"c:\wherever");
var searchPattern = @"*.txt";
var searchOption = SearchOption.AllDirectories;
var enumerable = new FileSystemEnumerable(root, searchPattern, searchOption);

One might also use it thus:

foreach (var fileSystemInfo in FileSystemEnumerable.Search(@"C:\wherever"))
{
    // ...
}

or:

foreach (var fileSystemInfo in FileSystemEnumerable.Search(new DirectoryInfo(@"C:\wherever"),
    "*.txt", SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly))
{
    // ...
}

This is using the new, static Search method.

Questions, comments, issues?

If you are using this class and find bugs, issues, or want to share something you've learned, please, make a post in the Issues section above.

Perhaps you might also want to fork this project and make what you think are improvements. Submit a pull request and then I will review it -- if I have time, of course!

Enjoy! I found this class very useful, and very well-tested. I hope you enjoy this post!

--Brian Hart