So I am trying to develop an application in C# right now (for practice), a simple file synchronization desktop program where the user can choose a folder to monitor, then whenever a change occurs in said directory, it is copied to another directory.

I'm still in school and just finished my data structures course, so I'm still a bit of a new to this. But what I was currently thinking is the best solution would be a tree, right? Then I could use breadth-first search to compare, and if a node doesn't match then I would copy the node from the original tree to the duplicate tree. However that seems like it might be inefficient, because I would be searching the entire tree every time.

Possibly considering a linked list too. I really don't know where to go with this. What I've got accomplished so far is the directory monitoring, so I can save to a log file every time something is changed. So that's good. But I feel like this is the toughest part. Can anyone offer any guidance?

CodePudding user response：

Use a hash table (e.g., Dictionary<string,FileInfo>. One of the properties of a FileInfo is the absolute path to the file: use that as the key.

Hash table looks up are cheap (and fast).