Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Copy, Move, and Delete Files

In addition to helping you gather information about the directories and files on your system, the My.Computer.FileSystem object also gives you quick access to a number of methods for performing common file-management tasks, such as copying, moving, and deleting files.

Note

In VB 2005, you can perform common file-management tasks with a single line of code.

How do I do that?

The My.Computer.FileSystem object provides several self-contained methods for performing common file-management operations. They are:

• CopyFile( ) and CopyDirectory( )

• MoveFile( ) and MoveDirectory( )

• RenameFile( ) and RenameDirectory()

• DeleteFile( ) and DeleteDirectory()

The way you use each of these methods is fairly straightforward. You supply two parameters: a source path and, if required, a target filename or path. For example, you can rename a file with this line of code:

My.Computer.FileSystem.RenameFile("c:\myfile.txt", "newname.txt")

These methods are also available in overloaded versions that give you additional features. We'll take a look at those next.

The move and copy methods of FileSystem are available in a variety of overloaded versions. If you need to overwrite an existing file or directory, be sure to use a version that includes the Boolean parameter overwrite and set it to True. Otherwise, you'll receive an exception and the operation won't be completed. Here's an example of one such option:

Note

In some beta versions, the user interface for moving or deleting ...