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I am trying to get the full path a file by its name only. I have tried to use : 

string fullPath = Path.GetFullPath("excelTest");

but it returns me an incorrect path (something with my project path).

I have read somewhere here a comment which says to do the following:

        var dir = Environment.SpecialFolder.ProgramFilesX86;
        var path = Path.Combine(dir.ToString(), "excelTest.csv");

but I do not know where the file is saved , therefore I do not know its environment.

can someone help me how to get the full path of a file only by its name?

Moriya Samun
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    Well, if you don't know where the file is, how should the API know? Are you looking for an alogrithm to search the file recursivly on your disks? – René Vogt Aug 01 '16 at 15:10
  • What do you want to happen if there are two files with the same name on your system? The problem that you describe, of GetFullPath() returning a file path within your project path, is a good example that it has found something locally and is happy enough with that. – LordWilmore Aug 01 '16 at 15:54

4 Answers4

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The first snippet (with Path.GetFullPath) does exactly what you want. It returns something with your project path because the program EXE file is located in the project\Bin\Debug path, which is therefore the "current directory".

If you want to search for a file on a drive, you can use Directory.GetFiles, which will recursively search for a file in a directory given a name pattern.

This returns all xml-files recursively :

var allFiles = Directory.GetFiles(path, "*.xml", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

https://stackoverflow.com/a/9830162/2196124

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zdimension
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What you're looking for is Directory.GetFiles(), you can read up on it here. The gist of it is, you'll pass in the file path and the file name, and you'll get a string array back. In this instance, you can assume top level with C:\. It should be noted, that if nothing is found, the string array will be empty.

Trasiva
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I guess you're trying to find file (like in windows search), right ?

I'd look into this question - you will find all files that has that string in their filename, and from there you can return full filepath.

var fileList = new DirectoryInfo(@"c:\").GetFiles("*excelTest*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

And then just use foreach to do you manipulations, e.g.

foreach(string file in fileList)
{
// MessageBox.Show(file);
}
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Vytautas Plečkaitis
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You have passed a relative file name to Path.GetFullPath. Microsoft documentation states:

If path is a relative path, GetFullPath returns a fully qualified path that can be based on the current drive and current directory. The current drive and current directory can change at any time as an application executes. As a result, the path returned by this overload cannot be determined in advance.

You cannot get the same full path name from a relative path unless your current directory is the same each time you invoke the function.

Gus
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