Recipe 11.3 Renaming a File

Problem

You need to rename a file.

Solution

With all of the bells and whistles hanging off of the .NET Framework, you would figure that renaming a file is easy. Unfortunately, there is no specific rename method that can be used to rename a file. Instead, you can use the static Move method of the File class or the instance MoveTo method of the FileInfo class. The static File.Move method can be used to rename a file in the following manner:

public void RenameFile(string originalName, string newName)
{
    File.Move(originalName, newName);
}

This code has the effect of renaming the originalName file to the newName file.

The FileInfo.MoveTo instance method can also be used to rename a file in the following manner:

public void RenameFile(FileInfo originalFile, string newName)
{
    originalFile.MoveTo(newName);
}

Discussion

The Move and MoveTo methods allow a file to be moved to a different location, but they can also be used to rename files. For example, you could use RenameFile to rename a file from foo.txt to bar.dat:

RenameFile("foo.txt","bar.dat");

You could also use fully qualified paths to rename them:

RenameFile("c:\mydir\foo.txt","c:\mydir\bar.dat");

See Also

See the "File Class" and "FileInfo Class" topics in the MSDN documentation.