The goal of this recipe is to see how easy it is to compose new paths on the fly. This is mainly because the path class has a handy overload for the / operator. In addition to that, the filesystem functions get along well with relative and absolute paths, as well as with paths that contain . and .. indirections.

There is quite a jungle of functions that return parts of a path instance, with or without transformations. We are not going to list all functions there are here because a short glance into the C++ reference is the best way to get an oversight.

The member functions of the path class, however, might be worth a closer look. Let's see which part of a path is returned by what member function of path. The following diagram also shows how Windows paths are slightly different from UNIX/Linux paths.

You can see that the diagram shows what the member functions of path return for an absolute path. For relative paths, root_path, root_name, and root_directory are empty. relative_path then just returns the path if it is relative already.