Non-member functions

Apart from the classes, C++ has pre-defined functions to help us fully use filesystem library.

Many non-member functions exist for manipulating the filesystem, which are:

Non-member functions Description
absolute Composes an absolute path.
canonical and weakly_canonical Composes a canonical path.
relative and proximate Composes a relative path.
copy Copies files or directories.
copy_file Copies file contents.
copy_symlink Copies a symbolic link.
create_directory and create_directories Creates a new directory.
create_hard_link Creates a hard link.
create_symlink and create_directory_symlink Creates a symbolic link.
current_path Returns the current working directory.
exists Checks if path refers to an existing file.
equivalent Checks if two paths refer to the same file.
file_size Returns the size of the file.
hard_link_count Returns the number of hard links to a file.
last_write_time Gets and sets the time of the last file modification.
permissions Modifies the file access permissions.
read_symlink Gets the target of the symbolic link.
remove Removes a file or an empty directory.
remove_all Removes a file or a directory with all its content recursively.
rename Moves or renames a file or directory.
resize_file Changes the size of a file by truncation.
space Returns the free space on the filesystem.
status Determines the file attributes.
symlink_status Determines the file attributes and checks the symlink target.
temp_directory_path Returns a directory for temporary files.

Read and set the last write time of a file

Thanks to the global function std::filesystem::last_write_time, you can read and set the last write time of a file. Here is an example, based on the last_write_time example from en.cppreference.com.

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