Find all files in a folder

Question

I am looking to create a program that finds all files of a certain type on my desktop and places them into specific folders, for example, I would have all files with .txt in

Answer 1

First off; best practice would be to get the users Desktop folder with

string path = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Desktop);

Then you can find all the files with something like

string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(path, "*.txt", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

Note that with the above line you will find all files with a .txt extension in the Desktop folder of the logged in user AND all subfolders.

Then you could copy or move the files by enumerating the above collection like

// For copying...
foreach (string s in files)
{
   File.Copy(s, "C:\newFolder\newFilename.txt");
}

// ... Or for moving
foreach (string s in files)
{
   File.Move(s, "C:\newFolder\newFilename.txt");
}

Please note that you will have to include the filename in your Copy() (or Move()) operation. So you would have to find a way to determine the filename of at least the extension you are dealing with and not name all the files the same like what would happen in the above example.

With that in mind you could also check out the DirectoryInfo and FileInfo classes. These work in similair ways, but you can get information about your path-/filenames, extensions, etc. more easily

Check out these for more info:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.directory.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143316.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.file.aspx