Angus Leeming <angus.leeming <at> btopenworld.com> writes:
If I understand correctly, the idiom to check whether a directory exists using Boost.Filesystem is
if (fs::exists(path) && fs::is_directory(path))
Under normal conditions the code above shouldn't throw, right?
Welcome to the wonderful world of filesystem exceptions. Your code will throw on many conditions. Some I know from the top of my head are (on windows): 1. path is a system file like pagefile.sys 2. the user don't have access to an element in the path. I have tried to point out several times that filesystem operations can and will throw. Production code without try/catch around ALL filesystem operations will cause problems (and don't assume that the catch statement should only handle racing and filesystem corruption exceptions). I think the documentation should have big red letters saying: - Never use any filesystem operation in production code without proper try/catch guards (or use the non-throwing versions in 1.34). - Never assume that an operations "will not throw under normal conditions" because it will. A good way to test your code is to run the application as a non-administrator and enter "c:\" and "C:\pagefile.sys" as test paths.