Hi: I was trying to do something simple with the boost::filesystem library on Win32 && I noticed that it has trouble with UNC paths. I think I noticed 2 bugs with boost::filesystem::exists (possible patch attached). Finally, I also had a question about what consistutes a "part" of a path. Here's the context: I was trying to get all of the parts of a path, starting at the front and moving to the end in order to find out at which point a path was invalid. So, I wrote a path-checker that went something like this: using namespace std; namespace fs = boost::filesystem; void check_path(const string iPath) { fs::path::default_name_check(fs::native); fs::path aCurrentPath; for(fs::path::iterator aItr1=iPath.begin(); aItr1!=iPath.end(); aItr1++) { aCurrentPath /= *aItr1; bool aExists(fs::exists(aCurrentPath)); if(!aExists) { cout << "Hey, this was invalid path and it failed at aCurrentPath" << endl; return false; } } return true; } The function works fine if you give it paths like "D:/foo/bar", but a UNC path like \\computername\share\foo\bar doesn't work. The reason is that the path::iterator returns the following results for the beginning of the UNC path: "//computername" "/" "share" "/" "foo" ... etc and "//computername" is not a valid path. I've got a couple of questions about this: 1) Why is the separator "/" a separate part of the path? Shouldn't there be a way to only get the directory parts of the path w/o the separators? Just curious .. I couldn't find a reference to that in the discussion list. 2) boost::filesystem::exists("//computername") will return false, always. That seems like the wrong answer, given that the path::iterator has returned it as a part of the path. I notice that the filesystem code does otherwise understand UNC paths otherwise. 3) boost::filesystem::exists("//computername/nofreelunch") will return true, if even "nofreelunch" doesn't exist. Looking at the implementation of filesystem::exists in boost libs/filesystems/src/operations_posix_windows.cpp line 324, I'd like to propose the following changes to fix cases 2 & 3. To fix case 3 above, the error code return for an invalid share is not PATH_NOT_FOUND, but ERROR_BAD_NETPATH. That's a simple addition to the list of error codes to check. That should be uncontroversial. To fix case 2 above, one must notice that you have a UNC path with 1 element - ie, a computer name. At the point you can either follow the hint in the code and simply return true, or you can call a different WIN32 function to see if the server exists. Attached is a proposed patch for both issues. 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