So, I’m writing something that is – eventually – meant to scrub the harddrive on IoC (indicators of compromise). The first major problem to solve is the following:

If I have drive ‘C:\’, and I try to enumerate all of the folders under the drive, Directory.EnumerateDirectories (including the recursive search option of all directories), then the first exception that throws stops the iteration – entirely.

This is, I suppose, desired behaviour from a code-provider’s perspective but entirely undesirable from a code consumer’s perspective.

So, how can we get around this? Well, we need a way to “swallow” the exceptions but to carry-on with the folders that we can access but we need to keep processing for this to occur. Instead of nesting foreach ad-infinitum (because we never know how deep or shallow the traversal might be), we would – instead – call the method recursively on itself.

So, it breaks down in the following code:

private static void EnumerateSubfolders(string path)
{
try
{
string[] directories = Directory.EnumerateDirectories(path).ToArray();
foldersList.AddRange(directories);
foreach (string directory in directories)
{
EnumerateSubfolders(directory);
}
}
catch
{
// Dispose of all of the exceptions about access because we can’t do anything about them.
}
}

Note that all we’re doing is going one child-folder deep, adding the results to the list of string of folders and then for each of those, traversing one child-folder deep, again. In this way, even if we hit an exception, we’ve gone one child deep and we stop processing for that child – without it affecting the traversal of the other children; which, while not the idyllic for obtaining all of the folders in Windows, is a far cry better than the entire process stopping on the first exception thrown.

Happy programming! 🙂