Get last modified file without enumerating all files

In c#, given a folder path, is there a way to get the last modified file without getting all files? I need to quickly find folders that have been updated after a certain time and if the file that was last modified is before the time, i want to skip the folder entirely. I noticed that folder's last modified time does not get updated when one of its file get updated 开发者_开发技巧so this approach does't work.

No, this is why windows comes with indexing to speed up searching. The NTFS file system wasn't designed with fast searching in mind.

In any case you can monitor file changes which is not difficult to do. If it is possible to allow your program to run in the background and monitor changes then this would work. If you needed past history you could do an initial scan only once and then build up your hierarchy from their. As long as your program is always being ran then it should have a current snapshot and not have to do the slow scan.

You can also use the Window Search itself to find the files. If indexing is available then it's probably as fast as you'll get.

Try this.

DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo("strPath");
DateTime dt = di.LastWriteTime;

Then you should use

Directory.EnumerateFiles(strPath, "*.*", SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly);

Then loop the above collection and get FileInfo() for each file.

I don't see a way how can you get the modified date of a file w/o getting reference to FileInfo() on that file.

I don't think FileInfo will get this file as far as I know.