How do I refer to a directory in Java?

Question

I'm running Windows and I'm trying to refer to a directory. My function starts off like this:

File file = new File("C:\\somedir\\report");
if (!file.exists()) {
  file.mkdirs();
}
doStuffWith(file);

I got a NullPointerException within the doStuffWith function, when I tried to call listFiles. Well I looked in C:\somedir and what did I find - there is a file called "report" with no extension, and also a directory called "report"! What seemed to happen was that the file object was referring to the report file rather than the directory. How do I make sure that I am referring to the directory and not the file?

Answer 1

one way to go about is to pass the file object corresponding to "C:\somedir" to the method and inside the method, do a listFiles() and walk through the contents, each time checking for file name and if it is "report", do a isDirectory(). proceed with actual processing when this returns true.