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What is a FileObject?

FileObjects are virtual files which live inside a FileSystem . They may represent a file on disk - or anything else walks and talks like a file, or can be made to - such as a file on a remote FTP server, a file entry in a JAR file, an entry in an XML file, etc.

FileObjects differ from java.io.File in certain ways:

  • You don’t generally ever have a FileObject representing a file that doesn’t really exist (if you think a FileObject may have been deleted, check isValid())

  • You can listen for changes on FileObjects

  • FileObjects can have key-value pairs of ad-hoc attributes associated with them

They are part of the Filesystems API; the javadoc for FileObject can be found here.

Apache Migration Information

The content in this page was kindly donated by Oracle Corp. to the Apache Software Foundation.

This page was exported from http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqFileObject , that was last modified by NetBeans user Tboudreau on 2010-02-19T01:44:39Z.

NOTE: This document was automatically converted to the AsciiDoc format on 2018-02-07, and needs to be reviewed.