FileSystemHandle: kind property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since ⁨March 2023⁩.

Secure context: This feature is available only in secure contexts (HTTPS), in some or all supporting browsers.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The kind read-only property of the FileSystemHandle interface returns the type of entry. This is 'file' if the associated entry is a file or 'directory'. It is used to distinguish files from directories when iterating over the contents of a directory.

Value

A string that can be:

'file': If the handle is a FileSystemFileHandle.
'directory': If the handle is a FileSystemDirectoryHandle.

Examples

The following function allows the user to choose a file from the file picker and then tests to see whether the handle returned is a file or directory

// store a reference to our file handle
let fileHandle;
async function getFile() {
 // open file picker
 [fileHandle] = await window.showOpenFilePicker();
 if (fileHandle.kind === "file") {
 // run file code
 } else if (fileHandle.kind === "directory") {
 // run directory code
 }
}