11.3. Renaming a File
Problem
You need to rename a file.
Solution
With all of the bells and whistles hanging off of the .NET Framework,
you would figure that renaming a file is easy. Unfortunately, there
is no specific rename method that can be used to rename a file.
Instead, you can use the static
Move
method of the
File
class or the instance
MoveTo
method of the
FileInfo
class. The static
File.Move
method can be used to rename a file in
the following manner:
public void RenameFile(string originalName, string newName) { File.Move(originalName, newName); }
This code has the effect of renaming the originalName file to the newName file.
The FileInfo.MoveTo
instance method can also be
used to rename a file in the following manner:
public void RenameFile(FileInfo originalFile, string newName) { originalFile.MoveTo(newName); }
Discussion
The Move
and MoveTo
methods
allow a file to be moved to a different location, but they can also
be used to rename files. For example, you could use
RenameFile
to rename a file from
foo.txt
to bar.dat
:
RenameFile("foo.txt","bar.dat");
You could also use fully qualified paths to rename them:
RenameFile("c:\mydir\foo.txt","c:\mydir\bar.dat");
See Also
See the “File Class” and “FileInfo Class” topics in the MSDN documentation.
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