[C#] Handy Tip - File Deletion and renaming

[LeeC22]

For anyone who writes any tools or mods that save files to disk and likes to add some fail-safe measures into that, this might be useful for you.

 

Add a Reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic to your project.

 

Add using Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO; in your class file.

 

You now get the option to use FileSystem.Delete, which has the option to determine what happens to deleted files. One of which is this:

FileSystem.DeleteFile(filename, UIOption.OnlyErrorDialogs, RecycleOption.SendToRecycleBin);

 

That will send any deleted files to the Recycle bin, which is far safer than just deleting them forever. You do have a RecycleOption.DeletePermanently option if that's what you really want.

 

As a bonus, you also get FileSystem.RenameFile, which makes far more sense than the C# hack of File.Move to rename a file.

 

Filesystem.RenameFile works like this:

FileSystem.RenameFile(oldFilenameIncludingFullPath, newFilenameWithoutAnyPathInfo);

 

So this would be a valid statement:

FileSystem.RenameFile(@"C:\SomeFolder\myFile.txt", "myNewFile.txt");

 

This would be an invalid statement:

FileSystem.RenameFile(@"C:\SomeFolder\myFile.txt", @"C:\SomeFolder\myNewFile.txt");

 

Invalid because it has the full path on both sides.

Edited February 17, 2021 by LeeC22