Directory.GetFiles with SearchOption or recursive search when searching directory tree

Question

When searching for files in a directory tree ( Folder and all sub-folders), what is the effective difference between doing this:

Directory.GetFiles(root, "*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

and doing your own recursive search using

Directory.GetFiles(root) and Directory.GetDirectories(root)

What are the pros and cons for using each method, which method is suited for which use case? Thanks.

Answer 1

The main reason you might want to 'roll your own' recursion in this case could be that you want to be able to set up custom progress updating / notification to users during a long file search.

This isn't possible if you hand everything over to the framework method from the start.