How to read the contents of a directory using FileManager

Swift version: 5.0

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

If you want to work with files FileManager almost certainly has the answer, and it's no different in this case: it has a method called contentsOfDirectory(atPath:) that lists all the files in a specific directory. For example, we could have it list all the files in our app's resource directory like this:

let fm = FileManager.default
let path = Bundle.main.resourcePath!

do {
    let items = try fm.contentsOfDirectory(atPath: path)

    for item in items {
        print("Found \(item)")
    }
} catch {
    // failed to read directory – bad permissions, perhaps?
}

In this particular case the try should never fail, but you should still have the catch block in there just in case.

Available from iOS 2.0 – see Hacking with Swift tutorial 1

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