How to quickly check if folder is empty (.NET)?

Asked 2009-04-16T10:45:14.220

183

I have to check, if directory on disk is empty. It means, that it does not contain any folders/files. I know, that there is a simple method. We get array of FileSystemInfo's and check if count of elements equals to zero. Something like that:

public static bool CheckFolderEmpty(string path)
{
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(path))
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("path");
    }

    var folder = new DirectoryInfo(path);
    if (folder.Exists)
    {
        return folder.GetFileSystemInfos().Length == 0;
    }

    throw new DirectoryNotFoundException();
}

This approach seems OK. BUT!! It is very, very bad from a perspective of performance. GetFileSystemInfos() is a very hard method. Actually, it enumerates all filesystem objects of folder, gets all their properties, creates objects, fills typed array etc. And all this just to simply check Length. That's stupid, isn't it?

I just profiled such code and determined, that ~250 calls of such method are executed in ~500ms. This is very slow and I believe, that it is possible to do it much quicker.

Any suggestions?

.net io directory

Edit Report

3 Answers

You could try Directory.Exists(path) and Directory.GetFiles(path) - probably less overhead (no objects - just strings etc).

answered 2009-04-16T10:54:13.573

I'm sure the other answers are faster, and your question asked for whether or not a folder contained files or folders... but I'd think most of the time people would consider a directory empty if it contains no files. ie It's still "empty" to me if it contains empty subdirectories... this may not fit for your usage, but may for others!

  public bool DirectoryIsEmpty(string path)
  {
    int fileCount = Directory.GetFiles(path).Length;
    if (fileCount > 0)
    {
        return false;
    }

    string[] dirs = Directory.GetDirectories(path);
    foreach (string dir in dirs)
    {
      if (! DirectoryIsEmpty(dir))
      {
        return false;
      }
    }

    return true;
  }

answered 2011-12-21T19:25:09.130

-1

My code is amazing it just took 00:00:00.0007143 less than milisecond with 34 file in folder

   System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch sw = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch();
    sw.Start();

     bool IsEmptyDirectory = (Directory.GetFiles("d:\\pdf").Length == 0);

     sw.Stop();
     Console.WriteLine(sw.Elapsed);

answered 2009-04-16T11:33:11.563

How to quickly check if folder is empty (.NET)?

3 Answers

Your Answer