Christian Cantrell

« New version of PixelWindow | Main | New ActionScript and Flex Spell Checking Engine on Adobe Labs »

July 13, 2009

Ignoring Hidden Files in AIR

I'm writing an AIR application that recursively traverses the file system, and I ran into an interesting problem. I discovered a file called permStore which exists at the time that it's read, but just milliseconds later, it no longer exists. I wasn't able to definitively determine what this temporary file is for, but it exists (for very short periods of time) inside the .Spotlight-V100 directory which essentially means that it's supposed to be hidden, it's owned by the operating system, and it's really none of my business.

I determined pretty quickly that nothing in the .Spotlight-V100 directory was relevant to my program, so I decided I would just skip the entire directly, and any other hidden, or "dot" file, as well. One simple line of code did the trick:

if (!dir.isDirectory || dir.isHidden || !dir.exists || dir.name.search(/^\..*$/) != -1) return;

Here's the full function I wrote for recursively traversing a directory, ignoring hidden and "dot" files, and stopping at length determined by MAX_FILES.

private function iterateFiles(dir:File):void
{
    if (!dir.isDirectory || dir.isHidden || !dir.exists || dir.name.search(/^\..*$/) != -1) return;
    var listing:Array = dir.getDirectoryListing();
    for each(var f:File in listing)
    {
        if (this.fileList.length >= this.MAX_FILES) break;
        if (f.isHidden || !f.exists || f.name.search(/^\..*$/) != -1) continue;
        if (f.isDirectory)
        {
            this.iterateFiles(f);
        }
        else
        {
            this.fileList.push(f);
        }
    }
}

Posted by cantrell at July 13, 2009 9:31 AM

Comments

Posted by: Sidney de Koning at July 14, 2009 5:38 AM