How to: Determine a File's Attributes in Visual Basic
The My.Computer.FileSystem.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 |
|---|---|
The file's archive status. Applications use this attribute to mark files for backup or removal. |
|
The file is compressed. |
|
This member is not used at this time. |
|
The file is a directory. |
|
All of the data in the file is encrypted. |
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The file is hidden and will not be displayed in an ordinary directory listing. |
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The file has no other attributes set. |
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The file will not be indexed by the operating system's content indexing service. |
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The file is offline. The data in the file is not immediately available. |
|
The file is read-only. |
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The file contains a reparse point, which is a block of user-defined data. |
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The file is a sparse file. Sparse files are usually large files containing data that is mostly zeroes. |
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The file is a system file. The file is part of the operating system or is used exclusively by the operating system. |
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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.AttributesQuery 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
See Also
Tasks
How to: Determine if a File is Hidden in Visual Basic
Reference
My.Computer.FileSystem.GetFileInfo Method