Counting the number of files/folders in a directory
Aug 26 2009 ยท Win32 Platform
I was looking for a fast way to get the number of folders in a directory. I didn’t need anything else, just the number of folders – this was for a folder tree, and to determine whether or not to display an expansion arrow that would pull and list the subfolders when clicked. The brute-force (read: slow) way to accomplish this is just to get an array of folders and get its length. I thought such information would exist within the directory metadata, but it turns out it doesn’t, and the brute-force way is the only way.
Quicker (quickest?) way to get number of files in a directory with over 200,000 files
How do I find out how many files are in a directory?
The stackoverflow questions refer to files, but files and folders are seen/enumerated the same way by Windows (FindFirstFile, FindNextFile), so the same limitation exists.
This post on The Old New Thing explains the reason for the lack of such metadata.
The file system doesn’t care how many files there are in the directory. It also doesn’t care how many bytes of disk space are consumed by the files in the directory (and its subdirectories). Since it doesn’t care, it doesn’t bother maintaining that information, and consequently it avoids all the annoying problems that come with attempting to maintain the information.
Another issue most people ignored was security. … If a user does not have permission to see the files in a particular directory, you’d better not include the sizes of those files in the “recursive directory size” value when that user goes asking for it. That would be an information disclosure security vulnerability.
Yet another cost many people failed to take into account is just the amount of disk I/O, particular writes, that would be required. Generating additional write I/O is a bad idea in general…
Completely understandable… but it still sucks on the application developer’s end. One solution I toyed around with is using the folder info to make a cache, instead of just getting the count and tossing the array to the garbage collector. This means, everytime a folder is expanded, the subfolders within the subfolders of the directory being expanded would be pulled and the necessary UI widgets would be created. However, this isn’t always ideal, especially as you go deeper into a folder tree, as you can end us wasting time pulling and creating UI widgets for a lot of folders which will never be seen by the user.