Introduction
First of all, let me tell you that this is my first contribution to CodeProject though I have been programming in C++ for more than five years now. Having said that, I think, I have good reasons to keep my first article short and simple for beginners.
Deleting a directory structure
The Windows API RemoveDirectory()
function deletes an existing empty directory. If the directory is not empty, function fails with a return value zero. But most of the times, we call a function for removing a directory, what we want is to delete the directory structure completely including all files and sub-folders in it.
If you want this, there's DeleteDirectory()
function to achieve it.
Source Code
BOOL DeleteDirectory(const TCHAR* sPath) {
HANDLE hFind;
WIN32_FIND_DATA FindFileData;
TCHAR DirPath[MAX_PATH];
TCHAR FileName[MAX_PATH];
_tcscpy(DirPath,sPath);
_tcscat(DirPath,"\\*");
_tcscpy(FileName,sPath);
_tcscat(FileName,"\\");
hFind = FindFirstFile(DirPath,&FindFileData); // find the first file
if(hFind == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) return FALSE;
_tcscpy(DirPath,FileName);
bool bSearch = true;
while(bSearch) { // until we finds an entry
if(FindNextFile(hFind,&FindFileData)) {
if(IsDots(FindFileData.cFileName)) continue;
_tcscat(FileName,FindFileData.cFileName);
if((FindFileData.dwFileAttributes & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY)) {
// we have found a directory, recurse
if(!DeleteDirectory(FileName)) {
FindClose(hFind);
return FALSE; // directory couldn't be deleted
}
RemoveDirectory(FileName); // remove the empty directory
_tcscpy(FileName,DirPath);
}
else {
if(FindFileData.dwFileAttributes & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY)
_chmod(FileName, _S_IWRITE); // change read-only file mode
if(!DeleteFile(FileName)) { // delete the file
FindClose(hFind);
return FALSE;
}
_tcscpy(FileName,DirPath);
}
}
else {
if(GetLastError() == ERROR_NO_MORE_FILES) // no more files there
bSearch = false;
else {
// some error occured, close the handle and return FALSE
FindClose(hFind);
return FALSE;
}
}
}
FindClose(hFind); // closing file handle
return RemoveDirectory(sPath); // remove the empty directory
}
DeleteDirectory()
function uses a small companion IsDot()
for checking '.' and '..' directory entries.
BOOL IsDots(const TCHAR* str) {
if(_tcscmp(str,".") && _tcscmp(str,"..")) return FALSE;
return TRUE;
}
Explanation
DeleteDirectory()
is a recursive function which navigates through a directory structure using FindFirstFile()
and FindNextFile()
APIs. If it finds a file, it deletes it. On the other hand, if it finds a directory entry, it just calls itself to recursively delete the directory. It returns TRUE
on success and FALSE
on failure.
That's all there's to it.