Working with the filesystem

There are many aspects of filesystems that are platform-specific. This section talks about portable ways of working with filesystems.

Working with filenames

Use path/filepath package to work with filenames in a portable way.

How do to it...

• To build a path from several path segments, use filepath.Join:

  fmt.Println(filepath.Join("/a/b/","/c/d")
  // Prints /a/b/c
  fmt.Println(filepath.Join("/a/b/c/d/","../../x")
  // Prints a/b/x

  Note that filepath.Join does not allow consecutive separators, and interprets ".." correctly.

• To split a path to its directory and filename parts, use filepath.Split:

  fmt.Println(filepath.Split("/home/bserdar/work.txt"))
  // dir: "/home/bserdar" file: "work.txt"
  fmt.Println(filepath.Split("/home/bserdar/projects/"))
  // dir: "/home/bserdar/projects/" file: ""

• Avoid using path separators (/ and \) in your code...