Copy the entire contents of a directory in C#

Question

I want to copy the entire contents of a directory from one location to another in C#.

There doesn't appear to be a way to do this using System.IO classes without lots of recursion.

There is a method in VB that we can use if we add a reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic:

new Microsoft.VisualBasic.Devices.Computer().
    FileSystem.CopyDirectory( sourceFolder, outputFolder );

This seems like a rather ugly hack. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

It may not be performance-aware, but I'm using it for 30MB folders and it works flawlessly. Plus, I didn't like all the amount of code and recursion required for such an easy task.

var source_folder = "c:\src";
var dest_folder = "c:\dest";
var zipFile = source_folder + ".zip";

ZipFile.CreateFromDirectory(source_folder, zipFile);
ZipFile.ExtractToDirectory(zipFile, dest_folder);
File.Delete(zipFile);

Note: ZipFile is available on .NET 4.5+ in the System.IO.Compression namespace

Answer 2

Much easier

//Now Create all of the directories
foreach (string dirPath in Directory.GetDirectories(SourcePath, "*", 
    SearchOption.AllDirectories))
    Directory.CreateDirectory(dirPath.Replace(SourcePath, DestinationPath));

//Copy all the files & Replaces any files with the same name
foreach (string newPath in Directory.GetFiles(SourcePath, "*.*", 
    SearchOption.AllDirectories))
    File.Copy(newPath, newPath.Replace(SourcePath, DestinationPath), true);