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LessIO

Build status nuget Nuget Downloads

This is a library for dealing with File I/O on .NET that overcomes some limitations of .NET's System.IO libraries (such as long path names) and aspires to be platform independent and require less time to ramp up on than System.IO.

It was created to factor out some of the file-system specific features that have built up in the LessMSI project.

Goals

  • Support File I/O operations on Windows that .NET's System.IO libraries fail to support such as long paths (those longer than 260 characters).
  • Provide a basis for platform independent file system access across both Windows and Unix-like systems such as Linux and Mac OSX, and potentially others (cloud file storage?).

Install

Install via NuGet.

Concepts & Usage

Two concepts are necessary to use the library FileSystem and Path. The static FileSystem class is a static class that contains all of the operations available on the FileSystem. Any operation that has a path argument, such as FileSystem.CreateDirectory, accepts paths as strongly typed Path objects rather than strings. For example:

Path destDir = new Path(@"c:\src\lessmsi");
FileSystem.CreateDirectory(destDir);

Having paths strongly typed rather than strings forces the caller to be more explicit and I believe leads to less errors in the code. Path also normalizes weird paths such as those with double directory seperators so that paths like c:\src\\lessmsi and c:\src\\lessmsi are equal when compared:

new Path(@"c:\src\\lessmsi") == new Path(@"c:\src\lessmsi") // true

Path has some handy shortcuts on it too such as Exists that calls back into the FileSystem to determine if the file or directory at the current path already exists. These methods also provides some compatibility with existing code using System.IO.FileInfo or System.IO.DirectoryInfo so that in many cases you can replace usage of System.IO.FileInfo/DirectoryInfo with LessIO.Path.

Path destDir = new Path(@"c:\src\lessmsi");
Console.WriteLine(destDir.Exists);

Path also offers some of the commonly used static methods on System.IO.Path to make the type relatively compatible with existing code using System.IO.Path. For example, Combine and GetFileName are available to make porting System.IO code easier:

Path.GetFileName(@"c:\src\lessmsi\README.md"); // README.md
Path.Combine(@"c:\src\lessmsi", "README.md"); // c:\src\lessmsi\README.md

Platform Independence

The current implementation supports Win32 via the Win32FileSystemStrategy.cs. However, adding support for another file system such as a Unixy file system could be done by implementing the ~10 methods on a class derived from FileSystemStrategy and then updating the implementation of FileSystem.LazyStrategy.

Contributing

We accept pull requests! I think this is a sound basis, but obviously there are many improvements that could be made such as improving platform independence by adding a new FileSystemStrategy or adding more static methods to Path from System.IO.FileInfo/DirectoryInfo to make it easier to port System.IO code over to this library. There might also be some important methods missing on FileSystem as I just added the operations that LessMSI already uses which I imagine is fairly extensive but maybe not comprehensive.

Please do make sure that existing tests pass and please add new ones for the new features you write.

Deploying

Deployment to NuGet and GitHub Releases is automated. To deploy a new release take the following steps:

  1. Make sure all changes are merged to master
  2. Checkout the commit from the master branch. Then tag the commit with the tag publish by running the following command: git tag -f publish
  3. Push the tag with git push --tags -f

The build script will then detect the tag, build it and publish it to GitHub Releases and Nuget.