Working around access denied in a FileWalking Tree in Java7

io, java, nio

Solution

If you are traversing the whole directory System and there is a situation where you got some type of Exception like `AccessDeniedException` and you want skip that file so that you could check the other file you need to override the `visitFileFailed` and skip that file or directory.

@Override
public FileVisitResult visitFileFailed(Path file, IOException exc) throws IOException {
    System.err.printf("Visiting failed for %s\n", file);
    return FileVisitResult.SKIP_SUBTREE;
}

This is the work around I have found when Walking through the directory system.

Problem

The following is some simple code just to test the `Files.walkFileTree()` method. However, the folder `/etc/ssl/private`, which has these permissions (`rwx--x---`), throws an exception, even when I thought I guarded it with an if statement (`if (permissions.equals("rwx--x---")`). What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance. ``` public static void main (String []args) throws IOException, InterruptedException { Files.walkFileTree(Paths.get("/"), new WalkingTheThing2()); } @Override public FileVisitResult preVisitDirectory(Path dir, BasicFileAttributes attrs) throws IOException { PosixFileAttributeView posixView = Files.getFileAttributeView(dir, PosixFileAttributeView.class); PosixFileAttributes posixAttr = posixView.readAttributes(); String permissions =PosixFilePermissions.toString(posixAttr.permissions()); if (permissions.equals("rwx--x---")) { return FileVisitResult.SKIP_SUBTREE; } return FileVisitResult.CONTINUE; } @Override public FileVisitResult visitFile(Path file, BasicFileAttributes attrs) throws IOException { try{ System.out.println(file.getFileName()+" " +Files.size(file)); return FileVisitResult.CONTINUE; } catch(IOException io){return FileVisitResult.CONTINUE;} } ``` The exception I get is: `java.nio.file.AccessDeniedException: /etc/ssl/private` EDIT: Solved by overriding `visitFileFailed`: ``` public FileVisitResult visitFileFailed(Path file, IOException io) { return FileVisitResult.SKIP_SUBTREE; } ```

Original source