File.Create() method fails when part of path does not exist

Question

I've been writing a simple console application as a part of exercise in project. Tasks are rather straightforward:

2nd method has to create nested directory tree where every folder name is Guid.

3rd method has to put empty file in chosen directory tree at specific level.

My main problem lies within 3rd method. Because while it works fine and creates file 'till third level of any directory, beyond that point it always throw "System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException" - as it "can't find part of the path".

I use string as a container for path, but since it's few Guid set together it gets pretty long. I had similar problem with creating directory, but in order to work I had to simply put @"\?\" prefix behind the path. So is there any way to make it work, or maybe get around that?

Here are method that fails. Specifically it's

File.Create(PathToFile + @"\blank.txt").Dispose();

And part of code which makes string and invokes it:

string ChosenDirectoryPath = currDir.FullName + @"\";

for (int i = 0; i <= Position; i++)
{
   ChosenDirectoryPath += ListsList[WhichList][i];
}
if (!File.Exists(ChosenDirectoryPath + @"\blank.txt"))
{
   FileMaker(ref ChosenDirectoryPath);
}

Edit:

To be specific, directories are made by method:

public List<string> DirectoryList = new List<string>();
internal static List<List<string>> ListsList = new List<List<string>>();
private static DirectoryInfo currDir = new DirectoryInfo(".");
private string FolderName;
private static string DirectoryPath;

public void DeepDive(List<string> DirectoryList, int countdown)
{
   FolderName = GuidMaker();
   DirectoryList.Add(FolderName + @"\");

   if (countdown <= 1)
   {
      foreach (string element in DirectoryList)
      {
         DirectoryPath += element;
      }

      Directory.CreateDirectory(@"\\?\" + currDir.FullName + @"\" + DirectoryPath);
      Console.WriteLine("Folders were nested at directory {0} under folder {1}\n", currDir.FullName, DirectoryList[0]);

      ListsList.Add(DirectoryList);
      DirectoryPath = null;

      return;
   }
   DeepDive(DirectoryList, countdown-1);
}

Which is pretty messy because of recursion (iteration would be better but i wanted to do it this way to learn something). The point is that directories are made and stored in list of lists.

Creating files works properly but only for the first three nested folders. So the problem is that it is somehow loosing it's path to file in 4th and 5th level, and can't even make those manually. Could it be too long path? And how to fix this.

Here is exception that throws out:

System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: „Can't find part of the path „C:\Some\More\Folders\1b0c7715-ee01-4df8-9079-82ea7990030f\c6c806b0-b69d-4a3a-88d0-1bd8a0e31eb2\9671f2b3-3041-42d5-b631-4719d36c2ac5\6406f00f-7750-4b5a-a45d-cebcecb0b70e\bcacef2b-e391-4799-b84e-f2bc55605d40\blank.txt”.”

So it throws full path to file and yet says that it can't find it.

Answer 1

You problem is that File.Create doesn't create the corresponding directories for you, instead it throws a System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException.

You have to create those directories yourself, by using System.IO.Directory.CreateDirectory()

---

If this exception occurs because of a too long path, you can still use the "long path syntax (\\?\)" like you did when creating your directories.

See also this question: How to deal with files with a name longer than 259 characters? there is also a good article linked