Almost every non-trivial C++ program manipulates UNIX® System path names.
Many of the operations performed on paths
are common to a large number of programs -- for example,
changing the extension of a path from .c to
.o, making an absolute path out of a relative path, testing whether
the file corresponding to a given path exists,
searching for a certain file in a
search path, and so on.
In this tutorial, we describe a C++ library which provides
these commonly performed operations.
The library also provides the additional operation
of wildcard expansion, which was heretofore available
only in the shell, and accessible to C and C++ programmers
only by doing slow, unreliable,
sh(1)
-based
system(3S)
calls.
The path library implementation of wildcard expansion is fast, reliable, and
uses the Korn shell pattern matching rules.
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