A method and apparatus for scanning files, wherein the method comprises: during the traversing of a directory, performing first processing on the traversed directory, the first processing comprising: acquiring a directory attribute of the traversed directory, and determining whether the traversed directory is a remapped directory according to the acquired directory attribute, and if so, performing no scanning processing on the traversed directory, and if not, performing scanning processing on the traversed directory, with the scanning processing comprising: scanning various files in the traversed directory to acquire a scanning result, and/or, performing second processing on various sub-directories in the traversed directory; and the second processing comprises: traversing the various sub-directories, and performing the same processing as the first processing on the traversed sub-directories. The IO overhead and CPU overhead during scanning can be effectively reduced by means of the present invention, thus improving the file scanning efficiency.