I have used the filesystem library for some time now and noticed that there is no portable way of iterating over files in a directory that matches a pattern. In my applications I often need to find all files in a directory that matches "*.txt" or "input.*". I think it would be a good idea to add another constructor to the directory_iterator that support some primitive wilcards. The support could be limited to "*" at the end or followed by a "." (e.g. "*", "a*.*", "*.txt", "a.*") for (path::directory_iterator itr = directory_iterator(path, "*.txt"); itr != directory_iterator(); ++itr) ... I assume this limited wildcard support could easily be ported to most operating systems. ------------------- Another small improvement that would make the directory_iterator easier to use is to somehow allow it to only list directories or files. In the current implementation you need to create a temporary to use an algorithm on all files in a directory (or use some lambda if construct). std::vector<path> tmp; std::remove_copy_if(directory_iterator(dir), directory_iterator(), back_inserter(tmp), std::ptr_fun(is_directory)) std::for_each(tmp.begin(), tmp.end(), func); instead of just std::for_each(directory_iterator(dir, files_only), directory_iterator(), func);