how to search the computer for files and folders

Question

i need a way to search the computer for files like Windows Explorer. i want my program to search lets say hard drive c:. i need it to search C:\ for folders and files (just the ones you could see in c:\ then if the user clicks on a file on the list like the folder test (C:\test) it would search test and let the user see what files/folders are in it.

Answer 1

Since you mentioned windows, the most straight forward winapi way to do it is with FindFirstFile and FindNextFile functions.

edit: Here's an example that shows you how to enumerate all files/folders in a directory.

#include <Windows.h>
#include <iostream>


int main()
{
    WIN32_FIND_DATA file;
    HANDLE search_handle=FindFirstFile(L"C:\\*",&file);
    if (search_handle)
    {
        do
        {
            std::wcout << file.cFileName << std::endl;
        }while(FindNextFile(search_handle,&file));
        FindClose(search_handle);

    }

}

Answer 2

This will be OS dependent. The SO question

How can I get a list of files in a directory using C or C++?

handles this problem well. You can download DIRENT here.

Now that you have this, I'd recommend recursively searching for a file with a DFS/BFS algorithm. You can assume the whole directory structure is a tree where each file is a leaf node and each subdirectory is an internal node.

So all you have to do is,

1. Get the list of files/folders in a directory with a function such as:
   void getFilesFolders(vector<string> & dir_list, const string & folder_name)
2. If it's a directory, go to 1 with the directory name
3. If it's a file, terminate if it's the file you're looking for, else move on to the next file.