Is there a faster way than this to find all the files in a directory and all sub directories?

Question

I\'m writing a program that needs to search a directory and all its sub directories for files that have a certain extension. This is going to be used both on a local, and a

Answer 1

I had the same problem. Here is my attempt which is a lot faster than calling Directory.EnumerateFiles, Directory.EnumerateDirectories or Directory.EnumerateFileSystemEntries recursive:

public static IEnumerable EnumerateDirectoriesRecursive(string directoryPath)
{
    return EnumerateFileSystemEntries(directoryPath).Where(e => e.isDirectory).Select(e => e.EntryPath);
}

public static IEnumerable EnumerateFilesRecursive(string directoryPath)
{
    return EnumerateFileSystemEntries(directoryPath).Where(e => !e.isDirectory).Select(e => e.EntryPath);
}

public static IEnumerable<(string EntryPath, bool isDirectory)> EnumerateFileSystemEntries(string directoryPath)
{
    Stack directoryStack = new Stack(new[] { directoryPath });

    while (directoryStack.Any())
    {
        foreach (string fileSystemEntry in Directory.EnumerateFileSystemEntries(directoryStack.Pop()))
        {
            bool isDirectory = (File.GetAttributes(fileSystemEntry) & (FileAttributes.Directory | FileAttributes.ReparsePoint)) == FileAttributes.Directory;

            yield return (fileSystemEntry, isDirectory);

            if (isDirectory)
                directoryStack.Push(fileSystemEntry);
        }
    }
}

You can modify the code to search for specific files or directories easily.

Regards