All I want to know is, wether there is a specific reason the path class can't deal with a normal space in any path. path p("a b"); throws filesystem errors. I'd like to point out, that this omission basically defeats the purpose of this library to be usabel cross-platform, since the two most used systems have directory names with spaces in it for very commonly used paths. Neither windows with "My Documents" or "Program Files" nor OS X with "Application Support" will allow to use the boost::filesystem::path class. And if you can't use it for those platforms, what is the point of using it if you still need to write platform specific code? Regards Jan Schukat