How to: Determine a File's Attributes in Visual Basic

Article
02/04/2013

The GetFileInfo method can be used to get a FileInfo object, which contains information about the specified file, including a FileAttributes enumeration.

This table shows the members of FileAttributes.

Member	Description
Archive	The file's archive status. Applications use this attribute to mark files for backup or removal.
Compressed	The file is compressed.
Device	This member is not used at this time.
Directory	The file is a directory.
Encrypted	All of the data in the file is encrypted.
Hidden	The file is hidden and will not be displayed in an ordinary directory listing.
Normal	The file has no other attributes set.
NotContentIndexed	The file will not be indexed by the operating system's content indexing service.
Offline	The file is offline. The data in the file is not immediately available.
ReadOnly	The file is read-only.
ReparsePoint	The file contains a reparse point, which is a block of user-defined data.
SparseFile	The file is a sparse file. Sparse files are usually large files containing data that is mostly zeroes.
System	The file is a system file. The file is part of the operating system or is used exclusively by the operating system.
Temporary	The file is temporary. File systems attempt to keep all of the data in memory for quicker access, rather than flushing the data back to mass storage. A temporary file should be deleted by the application as soon as it is no longer needed.

To determine if a file is encrypted

Get a FileInfo object for the file you wish to examine. This example gets a FileInfo object for the file Testfile.txt.
```
Dim infoReader As System.IO.FileInfo
infoReader = My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFileInfo("C:\testfile.txt")
```
Get a FileAttributes object from the FileInfo object. This example gets FileAttributes from the FileInfo object.
```
Dim attributeReader As System.IO.FileAttributes
attributeReader = infoReader.Attributes
```

Query FileAttributes. This example determines if the file is encrypted and displays a result accordingly.

If (attributeReader And System.IO.FileAttributes.Encrypted) > 0 Then
    MsgBox("File is encrypted!")
Else
    MsgBox("File is not encrypted!")
End If

How to: Determine a File's Attributes in Visual Basic

To determine if a file is encrypted

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