Crate dunce

Filesystem paths in Windows are a total mess. This crate normalizes paths to the most compatible (but still correct) format, so that you don’t have to worry about the mess.

In Windows the regular/legacy paths (C:\foo) are supported by all programs, but have lots of bizarre restrictions for backwards compatibility with MS-DOS.

And there are Windows NT UNC paths (\\?\C:\foo), which are more robust and with fewer gotchas, but are rarely supported by Windows programs. Even Microsoft’s own!

This crate converts paths to legacy format whenever possible, but leaves UNC paths as-is when they can’t be unambiguously expressed in a simpler way. This allows legacy programs to access all paths they can possibly access, and UNC-aware programs to access all paths.

On non-Windows platforms these functions leave paths unmodified, so it’s safe to use them unconditionally for all platforms.

Parsing is based on https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx

Project homepage.

Re-exports

• pub use self::canonicalize as realpath;

Functions

• canonicalize
  Like std::fs::canonicalize(), but on Windows it outputs the most compatible form of a path instead of UNC.
• simplified
  Takes any path, and when possible, converts Windows UNC paths to regular paths. If the path can’t be converted, it’s returned unmodified.