How do you clear the read-only flag on a file in .NET?

Question

How do you clear the read-only flag on a file in .NET and leave the rest intact?

Answer 1

I would get the FileInfo instance for the file, and then set the IsReadOnly property to false (as per the documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.fileinfo.isreadonly.aspx):

new FileInfo("path").IsReadOnly = false;

If you insist on using the static GetAttributes and SetAttributes methods on the File class, you can simply do this:

File.SetAttributes("path", 
    File.GetAttributes("path") & ~FileAttributes.ReadOnly);

The general pattern when you want to clear a flag on a bitmap is to take the value for the flag (in this case, FileAttributes.ReadOnly), invert it (using the ~ operator) and then apply the inverted value to the value that contains the various flags (in this case, File.GetAttributes("path")).

Answer 2

Can't you just do:

FileInfo f = new FileInfo("yourfile.txt");
f.IsReadOnly = false;

Or am I missing something?