Processing Data Files and Directories in Java

A File class object may refer to a data file or a directory. The Netbeans project DirectoryListDemo, discussed starting on page 8, shows how to get information about the contents of a directory using File class methods list() and listFIle(). The Netbeans project CreateDirectoriesDemo, starting on page 10, shows how to make a set of directories using the File class method mkdir(). The NetBeans project CopyFileDemoE has a method to copy a file.Your task is to use techniques from all three of these examples to create software that can be used to copy a directory and all of its contents, including subdirectories and their contents.

Your software should:

Ask the user for the source directory and a destination. The source is the directory to be copied; the destination is the directory that will be the parent of the new copy.

First your program should make a new directory in the new location with the same name as the source directory. (You may need to do something special for root directories if you are copying an entire disk. A root directory has no parent directory, and often, no name.)

Then your program should create an array with File class objects for each item in the contents of the source directory, similar to what was done in DirectoryListDemo.

Next , it should iterate the array, and for each item in the array,

if it is a file, copy the file to the new directory using the copyFile() method taken from CopyFileDemoE.

if it is a directory, recursively call this method to copy the directory and all of its contents.

The finished program will be a very useful utility. For example, a user could put an old flash ROM drive in one USB port, and a new flash ROM Drive in another USB port, and then, assuming that the two ports are the E: and F: drives, the user could run your program and tell it to copy E:/ to F:/, which would make a copy of the USB drive.