Can someone tell me if there's a problem with my recursive file search?

Question

I've been trying to get a recursive file search working. I wanted to go through each directory and add every file to a database so I can use extremely fast, advanced file searches through my program. I wrote up this code
<CODE>
package myrecursive;
import java.io.*;
public class MyRecursive {
public static void main(String[] args) {
recursiveSearch("D:/");
private static void recursiveSearch(String x) {
String tempFile="";
File dir = new File(x);
File[] curDir = dir.listFiles();
for (int a=0;a<curDir.length;a++) {
if (curDir[a].isDirectory()==false) System.out.println(curDir[a]);
else {
tempFile=curDir[a].toString();
recursiveSearch(tempFile);
</CODE>
The code was simple but I didn't think I could write it like this without killing my resources or getting a buffer overload. I ran it and it worked. However, I am running a high end box with 512MB of RAM and a 2.4 GHz processor so I don't know if what worked for me will work on a lower end machine. I was told you should avoid calling a method from itself is this true? How would I avoid it? Should I keep it this way? Any recommendations?
NOTE: I ran the code through JBuilder. JBuilder has a console built into the IDE and will return a noise and the error code whenever it hits an error. Although my app kept shooting out files it found out I heard a noise a few times. Does this mean anything?

Answer 1

First the formatting tags should be "[ ]" not "< >".
I was told you should avoid calling a method from itself is this true?Recursion is a valid programming technique and in fact makes many algorithms much easier to code.
so I don't know if what worked for me will work on a lower end machineIt may be a little slower but it will still work. Recursion only causes a problem with resources when you have many levels of recursion. On my system I have:
C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\
In this case there is only 4 levels of recursion. This is not going to cause a problem. You would generally only have problems if your recusion routine is not working correctly and you get in an infinite loop which will lead to resource problems and an abend.
In your particular case you aren't even using many resources at all since all you are doing is printing the file name.
This [url http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp?forum=57&thread=435487&start=3&range=1]post shows a recursive routine that list all files for a directory and displays them in a table. In this cause you might have a problem with resources depending on the number of files in the directory. But the resource problem is because of the memory to hold the filenames in the table, not because a recursive routine was used to get the filename.