C# / LINQ Directory.GetFiles

[Wheels012]

Good morning. I just started using Directory.GetFiles and I am wondering why it returns the path including the file name. It is my expectation that it would only return a list of file names as I already know the path. I have the follwoing code:

internal static void DemoGrouping()
{
string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\Documents and Settings\TEMP");

        //Convention: Name method so that it explains what the query is doing
        var fileList = from file in files
                       where file.Length > 1
                       orderby file.Length                       
                       group file by file.Length;


        foreach (var group in fileList)
        {
            //First print the group
           Console.WriteLine(group.Key);
            foreach (string subgroup in group)
            Console.WriteLine("   " + subgroup);
        }


    }

Without getting into substrings to extract the file name, is there a usage of Directory.GetFiles that accomplishes what I am looking for? Thank you, WHEELS

[Rob Philpott]

Don't think there is. Alernatively though, use DirectoryInfo.GetFiles(). This gives you an array of FileInfo, and from that you can just get the file name (.Name property).

Regards, Rob Philpott.

[realJSOP]

This (or something close to it) should get you just the file name.

string fileName = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(path);

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[Luc Pattyn]

GetFiles() and the like return the full path, which is useful as you can ask those methods to work hierarchically (SearhOption.AllDirectories), so just a filename would not always be sufficient. You can extract the filename from a full path using the Path class, you can't do the reverse. BTW: Using DirectoryInfo to get all of them at once is a costly operation if you only are interested in a few of the results returned. :)

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[Wheels012]

Thanks to everyone for the excellent replies. WHEELS