Introduction to Low-Level File Management Programming Topics

This document describes methods and functions for manipulating files and directories (folders).

You should read this document to learn how to:

• Represent file paths in Cocoa

• Perform basic operations with files and directories

• Find standard directories on the system

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following articles:

• File Management Classes describes the main classes you use for file-system operations.

• Creating Paths and Locating Directories explains how to compose paths used in file-system operations.

• File Management describes how you can perform many generic file-system operations.

• Information about Files and Volumes describes how you can get and set information about files and volumes.

• Using URLs describes how to use NSURL for various file-related operations.

• Working with the Contents of a Directory describes how to retrieve the contents of a directory using an NSDirectoryEnumerator object.

• Resolving Aliases describes how to resolve aliases in a file path.

• File Handle describes the class that provides a wrapper for accessing open files or communications channels.

• HFS File Types describes the APIs that allow a Cocoa application to retrieve and create HFS type and creator codes.