In the past, I've posted various patches to the filesystem library. Some of them were implemented, and some were not. In particular, I offered patches to implement symlink and readlink
http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/boost/msg52521.php
the who() function for filesystem exceptions,
Should not be needed - see libs/filesystem/src/exception.cpp for out of line definitions for these.
copy and copy_directory,
http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/boost/msg58652.php
and hard links.
http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/boost/msg61975.php
Since these posts, I've modified and extended some of them a little. I'm happy to post the new versions, but I am wondering if there is actually any interest in any of these things.
Personally - yes to all of those new functions - however filesystem's maintainer (Beman Dawes) isn't around right now, which explains the lack of feedback. How about if you work these up into submissions (full source + docs), then hopefully we can figure out a way of adding windows support and then getting them in the library. BTW if you submit as separate files rather than patches, it's easier for folks to test, we can always cut and paste into the existing code base later. John.