c# - How do I find out how many files are in a directory?

Question

I need to get a count of the number of files in a directory. I could get the names of all the files in the directory using System.IO.Directory.GetFiles() and take the length of that array but that takes too long on large directories. Is there a way to get just the count without having to get the names?

Answer 1

I don't believe so, no - at least not in vanilla .NET. I suspect it's not the actual fetching of the names that takes the time - it's the OS walking through the directory internals. There may be a Win32 call you could make via P/Invoke.

How large is the directory you're looking at? In general it's at least traditionally not been a good idea to have more than a few hundred files in a directory. File systems have improved at this in general, but I don't know what the current state is with NTFS and Fat32.