Creating an empty file in C#

c# .net
Paul Hollingsworth picture Paul Hollingsworth · Apr 29, 2009 · Viewed 154.2k times · Source

What's the simplest/canonical way to create an empty file in C#/.NET?

The simplest way I could find so far is:

System.IO.File.WriteAllLines(filename, new string[0]);

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Apr 29, 2009

Using just File.Create will leave the file open, which probably isn't what you want.

You could use:

using (File.Create(filename)) ;

That looks slightly odd, mind you. You could use braces instead:

using (File.Create(filename)) {}

Or just call Dispose directly:

File.Create(filename).Dispose();

Either way, if you're going to use this in more than one place you should probably consider wrapping it in a helper method, e.g.

public static void CreateEmptyFile(string filename)
{
    File.Create(filename).Dispose();
}

Note that calling Dispose directly instead of using a using statement doesn't really make much difference here as far as I can tell - the only way it could make a difference is if the thread were aborted between the call to File.Create and the call to Dispose. If that race condition exists, I suspect it would also exist in the using version, if the thread were aborted at the very end of the File.Create method, just before the value was returned...

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