Visual Basic Application Development
How to: Find Files with a Specific Pattern in Visual Basic

The My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFiles Method returns a read-only collection of strings representing the path names for the files. You can use the wildCards parameter to specify a specific pattern. If you would like to include subdirectories in the search, set the searchType parameter to SearchOption.SearchAllSubDirectories.

An empty collection is returned if no files matching the specified pattern are found.

To find files with a specified pattern

  • Use the GetFiles method, supplying the name and path of the directory you want to search and specifying the pattern. The following example returns all files with the extension .dll in the directory and adds them to ListBox1.

    Visual Basic 
    For Each foundFile As String In My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFiles( _
    My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.MyDocuments, _
    Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.SearchOption.SearchAllSubDirectories, "*.dll")

    Listbox1.Items.Add(foundFile)
Next
Security

The following conditions may cause an exception:

See Also

Tasks

How to: Find Subdirectories with a Specific Pattern in Visual Basic
Troubleshooting: Reading from and Writing to Text Files
How to: Get the Collection of Files in a Directory in Visual Basic

Reference

My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFiles Method
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