Creating an empty file in C#

Question

What's the simplest/canonical way to create an empty file in C#/.Net? Simplest way I can find so far:

System.IO.File.WriteAllLines(filename, new string[0]);

Answer 1

System.IO.File.Create(@"C:\Temp.txt");

As others have pointed out, you should dispose of this object or wrap it in an empty using statement.

using (System.IO.File.Create(@"C:\Temp.txt"));

Answer 2

File.WriteAllText("path", String.Empty);
File.CreateText("path").Close();

Answer 3

Path.GetTempFileName() will create a uniquly named empty file and return the path to it.

If you want to control the path but get a random file name you can use GetRandomFileName to just return a file name string and use it with Create

For example:

string fileName=Path.GetRandomFileName();
File.Create("custom\\path\\" + fileName);

Answer 4

Using just File.Create will leave the file open, which probably isn't what you want.

You could use:

using (File.Create(filename)) ;

That looks slightly odd, mind you. You could use braces instead:

using (File.Create(filename)) {}

Or just call Dispose directly:

File.Create(filename).Dispose();

Either way, if you're going to use this in more than one place you should probably consider wrapping it in a helper method, e.g.

public static void CreateEmptyFile(string filename)
{
    File.Create(filename).Dispose();
}

Note that calling Dispose directly instead of using a using statement doesn't really make much difference here as far as I can tell - the only way it could make a difference is if the thread were aborted between the call to File.Create and the call to Dispose. If that race condition exists, I suspect it would also exist in the using version, if the thread were aborted at the very end of the File.Create method, just before the value was returned...

Answer 5

You can chain methods off the returned object, so you can immediately close the file you just opened in a single statement.

File.Open("filename", FileMode.Create).Close();

Answer 6

//:D
bool exists = File.Exists("path");
exists = true;