Paths in NIO.2

In order to work with file system one must first be able to point to files and directories. The first thing that needs to be understood is the role of java.nio.file.Path class, the way instances are created and its functionality. As mentioned in previous articles, Path is just an abstraction of the file system location. This allows for the situations when directory does not even have to exist. NIO.2 presents more elegant solutions for getting the object representing file system location. This shields programmer from platform specific problems.

In general, Path instances allow two types of operations:

  • syntactic operations
    • any operations related to the Path representation itself – hierarchy traversal, conversion, comparison and so on
  • file operations
    • operations that modify location, state or contents of a file represented by a path instance

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File System API

Java platform long needed tools to work with file systems that are not so limited as those of prior releases to Java 7. Programmers require consistent behavior throughout many different platforms and efficiency in gathering file attributes and other data (or metadata). When it comes to platform specific capabilities of certain file systems, Java should benefit from them and provide the means to harness their power. Last but not least, programmer should always receive concrete description of exceptional situations during execution of their code.

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