Path

public interface Path
implements Comparable<Path>, Iterable<Path>, Watchable

An object that may be used to locate a file in a file system. It will typically represent a system dependent file path.

A Path represents a path that is hierarchical and composed of a sequence of directory and file name elements separated by a special separator or delimiter. A root component, that identifies a file system hierarchy, may also be present. The name element that is farthest from the root of the directory hierarchy is the name of a file or directory. The other name elements are directory names. A Path can represent a root, a root and a sequence of names, or simply one or more name elements. A Path is considered to be an empty path if it consists solely of one name element that is empty. Accessing a file using an empty path is equivalent to accessing the default directory of the file system. Path defines the getFileName, getParent, getRoot, and subpath methods to access the path components or a subsequence of its name elements.

In addition to accessing the components of a path, a Path also defines the resolve and resolveSibling methods to combine paths. The relativize method that can be used to construct a relative path between two paths. Paths can be compared, and tested against each other using the startsWith and endsWith methods.

This interface extends Watchable interface so that a directory located by a path can be registered with a WatchService and entries in the directory watched.

WARNING: This interface is only intended to be implemented by those developing custom file system implementations. Methods may be added to this interface in future releases.

Accessing Files

Paths may be used with the Files class to operate on files, directories, and other types of files. For example, suppose we want a BufferedReader to read text from a file "access.log". The file is located in a directory "logs" relative to the current working directory and is UTF-8 encoded.

     Path path = FileSystems.getDefault()