Is there a faster way than this to find all the files in a directory and all sub directories?

Try this iterator block version that avoids recursion and the Info objects:

public static IEnumerable<string> GetFileList(string fileSearchPattern, string rootFolderPath)
{
    Queue<string> pending = new Queue<string>();
    pending.Enqueue(rootFolderPath);
    string[] tmp;
    while (pending.Count > 0)
    {
        rootFolderPath = pending.Dequeue();
        try
        {
            tmp = Directory.GetFiles(rootFolderPath, fileSearchPattern);
        }
        catch (UnauthorizedAccessException)
        {
            continue;
        }
        for (int i = 0; i < tmp.Length; i++)
        {
            yield return tmp[i];
        }
        tmp = Directory.GetDirectories(rootFolderPath);
        for (int i = 0; i < tmp.Length; i++)
        {
            pending.Enqueue(tmp[i]);
        }
    }
}

Note also that 4.0 has inbuilt iterator block versions (EnumerateFiles, EnumerateFileSystemEntries) that may be faster (more direct access to the file system; less arrays)

Cool question.

I played around a little and by leveraging iterator blocks and LINQ I appear to have improved your revised implementation by about 40%

I would be interested to have you test it out using your timing methods and on your network to see what the difference looks like.

Here is the meat of it

private static IEnumerable<FileInfo> GetFileList(string searchPattern, string rootFolderPath)
{
    var rootDir = new DirectoryInfo(rootFolderPath);
    var dirList = rootDir.GetDirectories("*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

    return from directoriesWithFiles in ReturnFiles(dirList, searchPattern).SelectMany(files => files)
           select directoriesWithFiles;
}

private static IEnumerable<FileInfo[]> ReturnFiles(DirectoryInfo[] dirList, string fileSearchPattern)
{
    foreach (DirectoryInfo dir in dirList)
    {
        yield return dir.GetFiles(fileSearchPattern, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly);
    }
}

The short answer of how to improve the performance of that code is: You cant.

The real performance hit your experiencing is the actual latency of the disk or network, so no matter which way you flip it, you have to check and iterate through each file item and retrieve directory and file listings. (That is of course excluding hardware or driver modifications to reduce or improve disk latency, but a lot of people are already paid a lot of money to solve those problems, so we'll ignore that side of it for now)

Given the original constraints there are several solutions already posted that more or less elegantly wrap the iteration process (However, since I assume that I'm reading from a single hard-drive, parallelism will NOT help to more quickly transverse a directory tree, and may even increase that time since you now have two or more threads fighting for data on different parts of the drive as it attempts to seek back and fourth) reduce the number of objects created, etc. However if we evaluate the how the function will be consumed by the end developer there are some optimizations and generalizations that we can come up with.

First, we can delay the execution of the performance by returning an IEnumerable, yield return accomplishes this by compiling in a state machine enumerator inside of an anonymous class that implements IEnumerable and gets returned when the method executes. Most methods in LINQ are written to delay execution until the iteration is performed, so the code in a select or SelectMany will not be performed until the IEnumerable is iterated through. The end result of delayed execution is only felt if you need to take a subset of the data at a later time, for instance, if you only need the first 10 results, delaying the execution of a query that returns several thousand results won't iterate through the entire 1000 results until you need more than ten.

Now, given that you want to do a subfolder search, I can also infer that it may be useful if you can specify that depth, and if I do this it also generalizes my problem, but also necessitates a recursive solution. Then, later, when someone decides that it now needs to search two directories deep because we increased the number of files and decided to add another layer of categorization you can simply make a slight modification instead of re-writing the function.

In light of all that, here is the solution I came up with that provides a more general solution than some of the others above:

public static IEnumerable<FileInfo> BetterFileList(string fileSearchPattern, string rootFolderPath)
{
    return BetterFileList(fileSearchPattern, new DirectoryInfo(rootFolderPath), 1);
}

public static IEnumerable<FileInfo> BetterFileList(string fileSearchPattern, DirectoryInfo directory, int depth)
{
    return depth == 0
        ? directory.GetFiles(fileSearchPattern, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly)
        : directory.GetFiles(fileSearchPattern, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly).Concat(
            directory.GetDirectories().SelectMany(x => BetterFileList(fileSearchPattern, x, depth - 1)));
}

On a side note, something else that hasn't been mentioned by anyone so far is file permissions and security. Currently, there's no checking, handling, or permissions requests, and the code will throw file permission exceptions if it encounters a directory it doesn't have access to iterate through.

I recently (2020) discovered this post because of a need to count files and directories across slow connections, and this was the fastest implementation I could come up with. The .NET enumeration methods (GetFiles(), GetDirectories()) perform a lot of under-the-hood work that slows them down tremendously by comparison.

This solution does not return FileInfo objects, but could be modified to do so—or potentially only return the relevant data needed from a custom FileInfo object.

This solution utilizes the Win32 API and .NET's Parallel.ForEach() to leverage the threadpool to maximize performance.

P/Invoke:

/// <summary>
/// https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-findfirstfilew
/// </summary>
[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
public static extern IntPtr FindFirstFile(
    string lpFileName,
    ref WIN32_FIND_DATA lpFindFileData
    );

/// <summary>
/// https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-findnextfilew
/// </summary>
[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
public static extern bool FindNextFile(
    IntPtr hFindFile,
    ref WIN32_FIND_DATA lpFindFileData
    );

/// <summary>
/// https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-findclose
/// </summary>
[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
public static extern bool FindClose(
    IntPtr hFindFile
    );

Method:

public static Tuple<long, long> CountFilesDirectories(
    string path,
    CancellationToken token
    )
{
    if (String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(path))
        throw new ArgumentNullException("path", "The provided path is NULL or empty.");

    // If the provided path doesn't end in a backslash, append one.
    if (path.Last() != '\\')
        path += '\\';

    IntPtr hFile = IntPtr.Zero;
    Win32.Kernel32.WIN32_FIND_DATA fd = new Win32.Kernel32.WIN32_FIND_DATA();

    long files = 0;
    long dirs = 0;

    try
    {
        hFile = Win32.Kernel32.FindFirstFile(
            path + "*", // Discover all files/folders by ending a directory with "*", e.g. "X:\*".
            ref fd
            );

        // If we encounter an error, or there are no files/directories, we return no entries.
        if (hFile.ToInt64() == -1)
            return Tuple.Create<long, long>(0, 0);

        //
        // Find (and count) each file/directory, then iterate through each directory in parallel to maximize performance.
        //

        List<string> directories = new List<string>();

        do
        {
            // If a directory (and not a Reparse Point), and the name is not "." or ".." which exist as concepts in the file system,
            // count the directory and add it to a list so we can iterate over it in parallel later on to maximize performance.
            if ((fd.dwFileAttributes & FileAttributes.Directory) != 0 &&
                (fd.dwFileAttributes & FileAttributes.ReparsePoint) == 0 &&
                fd.cFileName != "." && fd.cFileName != "..")
            {
                directories.Add(System.IO.Path.Combine(path, fd.cFileName));
                dirs++;
            }
            // Otherwise, if this is a file ("archive"), increment the file count.
            else if ((fd.dwFileAttributes & FileAttributes.Archive) != 0)
            {
                files++;
            }
        }
        while (Win32.Kernel32.FindNextFile(hFile, ref fd));

        // Iterate over each discovered directory in parallel to maximize file/directory counting performance,
        // calling itself recursively to traverse each directory completely.
        Parallel.ForEach(
            directories,
            new ParallelOptions()
            {
                CancellationToken = token
            },
            directory =>
            {
                var count = CountFilesDirectories(
                    directory,
                    token
                    );

                lock (directories)
                {
                    files += count.Item1;
                    dirs += count.Item2;
                }
            });
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {
        // Handle as desired.
    }
    finally
    {
        if (hFile.ToInt64() != 0)
            Win32.Kernel32.FindClose(hFile);
    }

    return Tuple.Create<long, long>(files, dirs);
}

On my local system, the performance of GetFiles()/GetDirectories() can be close to this, but across slower connections (VPNs, etc.) I found that this is tremendously faster—45 minutes vs. 90 seconds to access a remote directory of ~40k files, ~40 GB in size.

This can also fairly easily be modified to include other data, like the total file size of all files counted, or rapidly recursing through and deleting empty directories, starting at the furthest branch.

Consider splitting the updated method into two iterators:

private static IEnumerable<DirectoryInfo> GetDirs(string rootFolderPath)
{
     DirectoryInfo rootDir = new DirectoryInfo(rootFolderPath);
     yield return rootDir;

     foreach(DirectoryInfo di in rootDir.GetDirectories("*", SearchOption.AllDirectories));
     {
          yield return di;
     }
     yield break;
}

public static IEnumerable<FileInfo> GetFileList(string fileSearchPattern, string rootFolderPath)
{
     var allDirs = GetDirs(rootFolderPath);
     foreach(DirectoryInfo di in allDirs())
     {
          var files = di.GetFiles(fileSearchPattern, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly);
          foreach(FileInfo fi in files)
          {
               yield return fi;
          }
     }
     yield break;
}

Also, further to the network-specific scenario, if you were able to install a small service on that server that you could call into from a client machine, you'd get much closer to your "local folder" results, because the search could execute on the server and just return the results to you. This would be your biggest speed boost in the network folder scenario, but may not be available in your situation. I've been using a file synchronization program that includes this option -- once I installed the service on my server the program became WAY faster at identifying the files that were new, deleted, and out-of-sync.

I had the same problem. Here is my attempt which is a lot faster than calling Directory.EnumerateFiles, Directory.EnumerateDirectories or Directory.EnumerateFileSystemEntries recursive:

public static IEnumerable<string> EnumerateDirectoriesRecursive(string directoryPath)
{
    return EnumerateFileSystemEntries(directoryPath).Where(e => e.isDirectory).Select(e => e.EntryPath);
}

public static IEnumerable<string> EnumerateFilesRecursive(string directoryPath)
{
    return EnumerateFileSystemEntries(directoryPath).Where(e => !e.isDirectory).Select(e => e.EntryPath);
}

public static IEnumerable<(string EntryPath, bool isDirectory)> EnumerateFileSystemEntries(string directoryPath)
{
    Stack<string> directoryStack = new Stack<string>(new[] { directoryPath });

    while (directoryStack.Any())
    {
        foreach (string fileSystemEntry in Directory.EnumerateFileSystemEntries(directoryStack.Pop()))
        {
            bool isDirectory = (File.GetAttributes(fileSystemEntry) & (FileAttributes.Directory | FileAttributes.ReparsePoint)) == FileAttributes.Directory;

            yield return (fileSystemEntry, isDirectory);

            if (isDirectory)
                directoryStack.Push(fileSystemEntry);
        }
    }
}

You can modify the code to search for specific files or directories easily.

Regards

I needed to get all files from my C: partition so i combined Marc and Jaider answers and got function with no recursion and with parallel programming with result of about 370k files processed in 30 seconds. Maybe this will help someone:

void DirSearch(string path)
    {
        ConcurrentQueue<string> pendingQueue = new ConcurrentQueue<string>();
        pendingQueue.Enqueue(path);

        ConcurrentBag<string> filesNames = new ConcurrentBag<string>();
        while(pendingQueue.Count > 0)
        {
            try
            {
                pendingQueue.TryDequeue(out path);

                var files = Directory.GetFiles(path);

                Parallel.ForEach(files, x => filesNames.Add(x));

                var directories = Directory.GetDirectories(path);

                Parallel.ForEach(directories, (x) => pendingQueue.Enqueue(x));
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
                continue;
            }
        }
    }

I'd be inclined to return an IEnumerable<> in this case -- depending on how you are consuming the results, it could be an improvement, plus you reduce your parameter footprint by 1/3 and avoid passing around that List incessantly.

private IEnumerable<FileInfo> GetFileList(string fileSearchPattern, string rootFolderPath)
{
    DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(rootFolderPath);

    var fiArr = di.GetFiles(fileSearchPattern, SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly);
    foreach (FileInfo fi in fiArr)
    {
        yield return fi;
    }

    var diArr = di.GetDirectories();

    foreach (DirectoryInfo di in diArr)
    {
        var nextRound = GetFileList(fileSearchPattern, di.FullnName);
        foreach (FileInfo fi in nextRound)
        {
            yield return fi;
        }
    }
    yield break;
}

Another idea would be to spin off BackgroundWorker objects to troll through directories. You wouldn't want a new thread for every directory, but you might create them on the top level (first pass through GetFileList()), so if you execute on your C:\ drive, with 12 directories, each of those directories will be searched by a different thread, which will then recurse through subdirectories. You'll have one thread going through C:\Windows while another goes through C:\Program Files. There are a lot of variables as to how this is going to affect performance -- you'd have to test it to see.

You can use parallel foreach (.Net 4.0) or you can try Poor Man's Parallel.ForEach Iterator for .Net3.5 . That can speed-up your search.

In .net core you can do something like this below. It can search for all subdirectories recursively with good performance and ignoring paths without access. I also tried other methods found in

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1383832/System-IO-Directory-Alternative-using-WinAPI

public static IEnumerable<string> ListFiles(string baseDir)
{
    EnumerationOptions opt = new EnumerationOptions();
    opt.RecurseSubdirectories = true;
    opt.ReturnSpecialDirectories = false;
    //opt.AttributesToSkip = FileAttributes.Hidden | FileAttributes.System;
    opt.AttributesToSkip = 0;
    opt.IgnoreInaccessible = true;

    var tmp = Directory.EnumerateFileSystemEntries(baseDir, "*", opt);
    return tmp;
}