I use Boost.Filesystem in a C++ "script": I use C++ instead of Python or shell script in order to be portable across operating systems. That script is used in bootstrapping the build system of my C++ project, and people have complained that they need to build boost.filesystem just to be able to bootstrap the project. This is made worse by the fact than the rest of my C++ project requires very recent versions of Boost headers and the fact that the ABI of filesystem has changed relatively recently. I had instances of people having problems because they were linking old versions of the filesystem library but using recent filesystem headers. They had a lot of trouble compiling the correct versions of filesystem themselves. I would also like to ship the script at installation time. To do that I statically link filesystem to reduce dependencies. My pretty trivial program, however, is more than 650kB in release mode after stripping (2.2 MB before stripping). All it does is walk a directory recursively and create a few files. I think this is too big. Therefore, I would really like it if there was a lightweight header-only version of Boost.Filesystem. I don't need the full extent of features; I just need to have the ability to do the following portably: - read all files of a directory - create directories - remove files and directories - rename files and directories The first point being the most important.