Azure File Share Check if multiple files exits

Question

We are using Azure File Shares (File shares, not GPV2, meaning we're not using blobs or queues, just File Shares) to store our files.

We need to check if a list of file paths exist of not.

Is there a "bulk" version of ShareFileClient.ExistsAsync ?

What's the best workaround otherwise ?

We tried calling Exists on each path, each call in it's own task, but it takes too long to return (for 250 paths it takes around 25 seconds):

var tasks = paths.AsParallel().Select(p => Task.Run(() =>
{
  // share is a captured variable of type ShareClient
  var dir = share.GetDirectoryClient(GetDirName(p));
  var file = dir.GetFileClient(GetFileName(p));
  var result = file.Exists();
  return result.Value;
}));

2 questions - 1) How many files are there in the directory? 2 - Do the files you want to check follow some naming pattern e.g. all of the files start with a common set of characters? — Gaurav Mantri, Nov 03 '22 at 15:58
@GauravMantri 1) There are 8 directories in the file share, each directory having subdirectories...etc. the leaf directories contain around 20 files each. 2) Not really. There are some files starting with a common set of characters, but there is no possible logic to locate them. — Abdelhakim, Nov 03 '22 at 16:28
Thanks. From your code above, it seems you want to check the existence of a file in a particular directory and not within that directory and its sub directories. Is that correct? — Gaurav Mantri, Nov 03 '22 at 16:33

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 03 '22 at 16:40

As such there's no direct way to check the existence of multiple files.

However, there is a workaround:

What you can do is list the files and subdirectories in a directory using GetFilesAndDirectoriesAsync(ShareDirectoryGetFilesAndDirectoriesOptions, CancellationToken) method. Once you get the list, you will loop over the list and and can check if a file by a particular name exists in a directory or not.

This will be much faster and cost efficient because you are making a single request to get the list of files instead of calling FileClient.Exists method on each file where each method call is a separate network request.

Azure File Share Check if multiple files exits

1 Answers1