C# Cookbook

11.9. Determining Whether a Directory Exists

Problem

You need to determine whether a directory exists prior to creating or performing an action on that directory.

Solution

Use the static Exists method on the Directory class to determine whether a directory currently exists:

if (Directory.Exists(@"c:\delete\test"))
{
    // Operate on that directory here
}

Discussion

Determining whether a directory exists can be critical to your code. If you try to delete a directory that no longer exists, a System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException will be thrown. This can be handled by catching the exception and reporting the failure accordingly for your application.

This method returns a bool indicating if the directory was found (true) or not (false).

See Also

See the “Directory Class” topic in the MSDN documentation.