Listing all files on my computer and sorting by size

Question

Recently I\'ve come into the problem that my hard drive is getting obnoxiously full, but after going through my personal files and deleting/moving all of the oversized video

Answer 1

Does it have to be in c#? Try this from a command prompt: dir c: /B /O-S /S /4 /a-d > fileList.txt

The dir command lists files, /B removes a bunch of info guff, /O-S displays the files in Order (by (S)Size (-)descending and goes through all subdirectories due to /S. The /4 bit just sets the year of files to four digits in case you have some from last century, and the /a-d weeds out the directory listings.

Answer 2

Try another overload of GetFiles:

string[] fns = Directory.GetFiles(dir, "*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

Also it will be more efficiently if you use EnumerateFiles:

const string dir = "C:\\";
var Sort = Directory.EnumerateFiles(dir, "*", SearchOption.AllDirectories)
                    .OrderByDescending(f => new FileInfo(f).Length);
foreach (string n in Sort)
{
        Console.WriteLine(n);
}

To avoid exceptions:

const string dir = "C:\\";
var fileInfos = new List<FileInfo>();
GetFiles(new DirectoryInfo(dir), fileInfos);
fileInfos.Sort((x, y) => y.Length.CompareTo(x.Length));
foreach (var f in fileInfos)
{
    Console.WriteLine(f.FullName);
}

private static void GetFiles(DirectoryInfo dirInfo, List<FileInfo> files)
{
    // get all not-system subdirectories
    var subDirectories = dirInfo.EnumerateDirectories()
        .Where(d => (d.Attributes & FileAttributes.System) == 0);
    foreach (DirectoryInfo subdirInfo in subDirectories)
    {
        GetFiles(subdirInfo, files);
    }
    // ok, now we added files from all subdirectories
    // so add non-system files from this directory
    var filesInCurrentDirectory = dirInfo.EnumerateFiles()
        .Where(f => (f.Attributes & FileAttributes.System) == 0);
    files.AddRange(filesInCurrentDirectory);
}

Answer 3

So I put my programmer brain to work and decided that instead of meticulously going through each folder and > subfolder myself and using the right-click + Properties function of Windows to see how big a file is and whether or not its worth keeping around, I could write a simple code that would search for every file on my > computer, throw it into a list by its full path name, and put its file size right next to it, then sort it from greatest to least by file size.

While this is a fun programming exercise, if your goal is to solve the problem at hand, there is a nice utility that will do this for you: WinDirStat