The Path struct represents file paths in the underlying filesystem. There are two flavors of Path: posix::Path, for UNIX-like systems, and windows::Path, for Windows. The prelude exports the appropriate platform-specific Path variant.

A Path can be created from an OsStr, and provides several methods to get information from the file/directory the path points to.

Note that a Path is not internally represented as an UTF-8 string, but instead is stored as a vector of bytes (Vec<u8>). Therefore, converting a Path to a &str is not free and may fail (an Option is returned).

use std::path::Path;

fn main() {
    // Create a `Path` from an `&'static str`
    let path = Path::new(".");

    // The `display` method returns a `Show`able structure
    let _display = path.display();

    // `join` merges a path with a byte container using the OS specific
    // separator, and returns the new path
    let new_path = path.join("a").join("b");

    // Convert the path into a string slice
    match new_path.to_str() {
        None => panic!("new path is not a valid UTF-8 sequence"),
        Some(s) => println!("new path is {}", s),
    }
}

Be sure to check at other Path methods (posix::Path or windows::Path) and the Metadata struct.

OsStr and Metadata.