Overview

Filesystem Overview

While the Standard Library lacked some important features, you could always use Boost with its dozens of sub-libraries and do the work. The C++ Committee decided that the Boost libraries are so important that some of the systems were merged into the Standard. For example, smart pointers (although improved with the move semantics in C++11), regular expressions, std::optional, std::any and much more.

A similar story happened with std::filesystem.

The filesystem library is modelled directly from Boost filesystem, which has been available since 2003 (with the version 1.30). In C++ implementation, the committee also extended the component with non-POSIX systems. The library was firstly available as TS (Technical Specification) and later, after a long time of improvements and feedback, merged into the C++17 Standard.

The library is located in the <filesystem> header, and it uses namespace std::filesystem.