Non-recursive way to get all files in a directory and its subdirectories in Java

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I am trying to get a list of all files in a directory and its subdirectories. My current recursive approach is as follows:

private void printFiles(File dir) {
  for (File child : dir.listFiles()) {
    if (child.isDirectory()) {
      printFiles(child);
    } else if (child.isFile()) {
      System.out.println(child.getPath());
    }
  }
}

printFiles(new File("somedir/somedir2"));

However, I was hoping there was a non-recursive way (an existing API call, maybe) of doing this. If not, is this the cleanest way of doing this?

3 Answers

Java 8 onward, you can use Files#walk to list out all files and directories recursively in a given directory. Further you can apply the filter like Files::isRegularFile to filter out the directories if you need only regular files.

On the flip side, if you only need to list the given directory but not its sub-directories, you can use the lazy method Files#list which will only give you the files and directories in the given directory. You can again further apply the filter mentioned above.

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