FindFile class for Windows projects

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Introduction

Searching for files and directories is something we, as programmers, have to do in many projects. I have always thought that there must be something someone out there wrote to make my life easier in this regard. I have done a lot of looking around but most of what I've found has had a dependency on a specific IDE, like VS and MFC for example. So, I decided to write my own, make it IDE independent and add some useful features. FindFile, is the result of my efforts.

Using the code

The code that allows searching consists of the files FindFile.h, FindFile.cpp, wildcard.h, and wildcard.cpp. To use the code, you need to initialize a FindFileOptions_t structure and pass it by reference to the constructor of FindFile. Here is a snippet of the structure, listing options used by FindFile:

struct FindFileOptions_t
{
    bool recursive;         // Whether to look inside subdirectories
    bool returnFolders;     // Return folder names as results too

    bool *terminateValue;   // Value to check to see whether search 
                            // should be terminated

    string location;        // Where to search for files

    string filter;          // Filter for files to be included

    string excludeFile;     // Exclude filter for files
    string excludeDir;      // Exclude filter for directories
};

Some of these options require explaining. The returnFolders option specifies whether FindFile should return both files and directories in its return results. The terminateValue option is a pointer to some integer in memory whose value will be read to determine whether the search should be aborted. This is useful to have when incorporating this class in a multi-threaded environment (as is most likely the case). If the value in the integer pointed to by terminateValue is anything but 0 the search will abort. If you do not want to use this feature, just set terminateValue to NULL.

Here is an example of a program that uses FindFile:

    FindFileOptions_t opts;
    opts.excludeDir = "CSE*;*53*";
    opts.excludeFile = "*.pdf;*.doc";
    opts.filter = "*";
    opts.location = "C:\\School";
    opts.recursive = true;
    opts.returnFolders = false;
    opts.terminateValue = NULL;

    FindFile find(opts);
    find.search();

    int nfiles = (int) find.filelist.size();
    __int64 size = find.listsize;

    // Print out the list of files found
    for (int i = 0; i < (int) find.filelist.size(); i++)
    {
        string fullname = FindFile::combinePath(find.filelist[i].path, 
                       find.filelist[i].fileinfo.cFileName);
        printf("%s\n", fullname.c_str());
    }

    printf("Found: %d files (%ld bytes)", nfiles, size);

This example will recursively search for all files in directory "C:\School" which do not have a PDF or DOC extension and will not look for files in subdirectories that begin with "CSE" or contain "53".

History

• December 27, 2003
  • Updated source code to reflect bug fix on searching of files in root drives.
• November 29, 2002
  • All references to the GNU public license have been removed from the code. You are free to use this code any way you see fit as long as the original copyright statement remains in all versions you modify/redistribute.
• November 28, 2002
  • This is the first version of the code but has been used in many projects of mine for many years. If you find a bug, though, or feel some parts can be done better, please let me know.