Recursively moving files from one directory to another only partially completes

Question

Based on an answer to: List all files from a directory recursively with Java

I have written a little Filemover which will recursively move every file from a directory and place them in the top level of another directory. But for some reason, the code doesn't move all the files. I switched to using Files.move() but while definitely worth while the code is still not walking the directory tree properly. Now I am getting a java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException while trying to move the files.

The stack trace says that its an unknown source, yet when I look to see if the file is there it is. I have isolated the problem to Files.move() but I can't seems to fix it. I have tried both getPath() and getAbsolutePath(). What's even weirder I use a similar method in my sorting routine and it works fine. The only difference is that my source directory has no subdirectories.

I have solved the partial tree walk. It was caused because my ImageFilter only had lower case extensions and the filter needed to be case sensitive. So I fixed it here.

Okay, I switched my little Filemover back to file.renameTo() and it works properly now. It's just a testing tool for randomly moving files into a drop directory for my image sorter so it's not worth figuring out why I was getting no such file exceptions. I was just modifying it to work recursively so it could be used to reverse a sort if someone used the wrong sorting routine on a bunch of images.

Thanks for all your help :)

I have 3 classes

 import java.io.File;
import java.util.Collection;
import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;



import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;
import org.apache.commons.io.filefilter.DirectoryFileFilter;

import ca.fotonow.p3software.ImageFileFilter;

public class PSFileUtils {
    public static Collection<File> listfiles(String directory) {

        // TODO Auto-generated method stub
        File dir= new File (directory);
        dir.mkdirs(); //create directory if it doesn't exist.
        Collection<File> files= FileUtils.listFiles(dir,new ImageFileFilter(),DirectoryFileFilter.DIRECTORY);


        return files;
    }
   }

Filter Class

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileFilter;

import org.apache.commons.io.filefilter.IOFileFilter;

public class ImageFileFilter implements IOFileFilter {
    private final String filetypes[]= new String[] {"jpeg", "JPEG","jpg","JPG","tif","TIF","tiff","TIFF","raw","RAW"}; 
    @Override
    public boolean accept(File file) {
        for (String ext: filetypes) {
            if (file.getName().toLowerCase().endsWith(ext)) return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
    @Override
    public boolean accept(File arg0, String arg1) {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub
        return false;
    }

}

The main class

import java.io.File;
import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Random;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import static java.nio.file.StandardCopyOption.*;

public class FileMover {

    /**
     * @param args
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
    //Move random number of files from one directory args[0] to another directory args[1]
    //directories can be relative
    //Repeats randomly until files are gone

    String dir1=args[0];
    String dir2=args[1];



    Collection<File> files=PSFileUtils.listfiles(dir1);

    for (File file: files) {

        File newfile=new File(dir2+"/"+file.getName());

        try {
        Files.move(file.toPath(),newfile.toPath(), REPLACE_EXISTING);
    } catch (IOException e1) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e1.printStackTrace();
    }
        System.out.println((new Date()).getTime()+ " "+ newfile.getName());

        Random generator =new Random(new Date().getTime());
        try {
            Thread.sleep(generator.nextInt(5000));
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

}

Any idea of what I have wrong?

Answer 1

Though @nitegazer is correct I should have used Files.move() instead of File.renameTo(). It turns out that that was not the reason for the partial file tree walk. The file tree walk was failing because the filter is case sensitive and I only provided lower case versions of the file extensions.

I did have a problem with a little script that I use to randomly fill the input hopper for testing the sorter but that just a test script and works fine with File.renameTo().

Answer 2

Renaming the file might not move the file, according to the javadocs:

Many aspects of the behavior of this method are inherently platform-dependent: The rename operation might not be able to move a file from one filesystem to another, it might not be atomic, and it might not succeed if a file with the destination abstract pathname already exists. The return value should always be checked to make sure that the rename operation was successful.

Try java.nio.file.Files.move() instead.