Best way to determine if two path reference to same file in Windows?
Open both files with CreateFile
, call GetFileInformationByHandle
for both, and compare dwVolumeSerialNumber
, nFileIndexLow
, nFileIndexHigh
. If all three are equal they both point to the same file:
GetFileInformationByHandle
function
BY_HANDLE_FILE_INFORMATION
Structure
use the GetFullPathName from kernel32.dll, this will give you the absolute path of the file. Then compare it against the other path that you have using a simple string compare
edit: code
TCHAR buffer1[1000];
TCHAR buffer2[1000];
TCHAR buffer3[1000];
TCHAR buffer4[1000];
GetFullPathName(TEXT("C:\\Temp\\..\\autoexec.bat"),1000,buffer1,NULL);
GetFullPathName(TEXT("C:\\autoexec.bat"),1000,buffer2,NULL);
GetFullPathName(TEXT("\\autoexec.bat"),1000,buffer3,NULL);
GetFullPathName(TEXT("C:/autoexec.bat"),1000,buffer4,NULL);
_tprintf(TEXT("Path1: %s\n"), buffer1);
_tprintf(TEXT("Path2: %s\n"), buffer2);
_tprintf(TEXT("Path3: %s\n"), buffer3);
_tprintf(TEXT("Path4: %s\n"), buffer4);
the code above will print the same path for all three path representations.. you might want to do a case insensitive search after that
See this question: Best way to determine if two path reference to same file in C#
The question is about C#, but the answer is just the Win32 API call GetFileInformationByHandle
.