.Net DriveInfo() with UNC paths?

.net unc driveinfo
Jörg Battermann picture Jörg Battermann · Mar 24, 2009 · Viewed 9.4k times · Source

Good morning,

is there a way to get a DriveInfo instance for UNC paths (e.g. "\fors343a.ww123.somedomain.net\folder\1\") because for example... 

var driveInfo = new System.IO.DriveInfo(drive);

... throws an ArgumentException ("Object must be a root directory (\"C:\\") or a drive letter (\"C\").") when using that UNC path above.

What would I use in order to retrieve information about that or e.g. how would I check whether a given folder resides on a local drive or an unc path?

Answer

Jim Mischel picture Jim Mischel · Mar 24, 2009

The Remarks section for the DriveInfo constructor says:

The drive name must be either an uppercase or lowercase letter from 'a' to 'z'. You cannot use this method to obtain information on drive names that are nullNothingnullptra null reference (Nothing in Visual Basic) or use UNC (\server\share) paths.

I was able to make it work by mapping a network drive in Windows Explorer. That is, I mapped "\server\share" to drive Z, and then DriveInfo("Z:\\"); gave me what I expected.

Unfortunately, there's no simple way to map a network drive from C#. You'll either have to execute an external command (i.e. "net use z: \server\share"), or call the Windows WNetAddConnection2 API function to do it. Either way you go, you'll need to remove the drive mapping when you're done.

Related questions

What is the correct way to check if a path is an UNC path or a local path?

The easiest way to check if a path is an UNC path is of course to check if the first character in the full path is a letter or backslash. Is this a good solution or could there be problems …

Read More
Method to determine if path string is local or remote machine

What's the best way, using C# or other .NET language, to determine if a file path string is on the local machine or a remote server? It's possible to determine if a path string is UNC using the following: new …

Read More
Check if server path is available as file share in C#

I want to quickly check if a file share is available in C#, but without knowing anything about the directories that might be on the network share. I have found these posts 1 2 3 that show how to check if a network …

Read More