Why is the command dir inconsistent about recognizing directories?

Hi All,

I have an application that stores setup data in a specific folder. When it starts it looks to see if that folder exists so it can load the current data. If not it creates the folder and saves default settings. My script was working just fine last week, and today for some reason, it doesn't recognize the folder that it creates as a directory. Specifically if I call d=dir;, and i is the instance of the folder (that I can see in Windows Explorer), then d(i).name is the name of the folder, but d(i).isdir returns a 0. Here's some of the code:

d = dir;
create_data_folder = 1;
for i=1:length(d)
    fprintf('The name is %s and isdir is %d\n',d(i).name,d(i).isdir)
    if d(i).isdir
        if strcmp(d(i).name, 'Folder Name')
            create_data_folder = 0;
            fprintf('Starting up.\n');
        end
    end
end

After this, if create_data_folder is 1, it uses a mkdir command to create the folder "Folder Name". Once it's there, sometimes it recognizes it as a directory and sometimes it doesn't! I'd appreciate it if anyone has any ideas. Thanks.

Glenn

[Cedric]

Did you try to see what EXIST returns using the 'kind' argument 'dir' and 'file'?

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Here's an alternate way using genpath:

startingFolder = pwd; % or wherever...
folderList = genpath(startingFolder)
baseFolderToSearchFor = '\tests3'
folderToCreate =  fullfile(startingFolder, baseFolderToSearchFor)
if strfind(lower(folderList), lower(baseFolderToSearchFor)) > 1
  fprintf('Found the %s folder\n', folderToCreate);
else
  fprintf('Did not find the %s folder.\nWill create it.\n', folderToCreate);
%   mkdir(folderToCreate);
end

[Glenn]

This worked nicely! Thanks.