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Checking a File or Directory

You have a Path instance representing a file or directory, but does that file exist on the file system? Is it readable? Writable? Executable?

Verifying the Existence of a File or Directory

The methods in the Path class are syntactic, meaning that they operate on the Path instance. But eventually you must access the file system to verify that a particular Path exists, or does not exist. You can do so with the exists(Path, LinkOption...) and the notExists(Path, LinkOption...) methods. Note that !Files.exists(path) is not equivalent to Files.notExists(path). When you are testing a file's existence, three results are possible:

The file is verified to exist.
The file is verified to not exist.
The file's status is unknown. This result can occur when the program does not have access to the file.

If both exists and notExists return false, the existence of the file cannot be verified.

Checking File Accessibility

To verify that the program can access a file as needed, you can use the isReadable(Path), isWritable(Path), and isExecutable(Path) methods.

The following code snippet verifies that a particular file exists and that the program has the ability to execute the file.

Path file = ...;
boolean isRegularExecutableFile = Files.isRegularFile(file) &
                                  Files.isReadable(file) &
                                  Files.isExecutable(file);

Note: Once any of these methods completes, there is no guarantee that the file can be accessed. A common security flaw in many applications is to perform a check and then access the file. For more information, use your favorite search engine to look up TOCTTOU (pronounced TOCK-too).

Checking Whether Two Paths Locate the Same File

When you have a file system that uses symbolic links, it is possible to have two different paths that locate the same file. The isSameFile(Path, Path) method compares two paths to determine if they locate the same file on the file system. For example:

Path p1 = ...;
Path p2 = ...;

if (Files.isSameFile(p1, p2)) {
    //Logic when the paths locate the same file
}

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