frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Path is a utility for working with paths

https://gitlab.com/SpyrjaGaldr/path
60•spyrja•11mo ago
A recent post here got me thinking about my own personal gripes with OS path handling offerings. So I've basically spent the passed couple of days working on a little project in an attempt to rectify the situation somewhat (in the spirit of cross-platform development). It should also work pretty well with existing tools. Let me know what you think, and feel free to open an issue or a pull-request if you have any problems getting it running it on your system. Enjoy!

Github link: https://github.com/SpyrjaGaldr/path

https://simonsafar.com/2025/path_as_system_call/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788728

Comments

vesinisa•11mo ago
What can this do that standard Unix find can not do?
autobodie•11mo ago
cross platform support, according to the description.
indemnity•11mo ago
fd exists https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
spyrja•11mo ago
Looks like it has a pretty good interface as well. It does however seem a just a bit too top-heavy (lot's of dependencies) not to mention a few more bugs than I particularly care for. But sheesh, 37K stars, it must be good for something!
blooalien•11mo ago
> ... "it must be good for something!"

It's good for finding files fast, and piping the resulting file paths into other tools for further action / handling. It does what it claims to do and does it well. :)

spyrja•11mo ago
I would say the default behaviour just isn't very ergonomic. Suppressing warnings for example requires piping to /dev/null (whereas `path` supresses permission warnings by default), if you want to limit the number of results you have to pipe the output to another command, getting xargs-like behaviour (obviously), or putting quotes around lines with embedded spaces, there are simply more hoops to jump through. It's much easier to type "path -sf .jpg .jpeg .png" than whatever would be required to get the `find` utility to do the same. (Or, say, finding all node_modules folders with "path -z n_m", it's just so much more satisfying.) But yes, these are mostly just syntactic-sugar kinds of issues. Aside from that (and perhaps the lack of cross-platform compatibility), I would say there is nothing inherently deficient about the `find` command. It's a work-horse which probably has more features than `path` does. But the latter really is growing on me. It is actually quite fun to use, if I may say so myself!
jimbokun•11mo ago
“A more ergonomic find command” is a nice elevator pitch.
pimlottc•11mo ago
From the name and description, I expected this to perform operations on file path strings, like convert relative to absolute (and vice versa), expand symlinks, convert unix paths to dos, etc. This is more like a find command.
spyrja•11mo ago
I don't see why it necessarily couldn't, my only question would be if there are really many actual use cases for such things? As far as symlinks go, I suppose being able to expand them (but not following them!) might be somewhat useful. But converting to DOS paths and vice-versa? That just doesn't seem very useful. Nevermind converting to-and-fro relative and absolute paths, I can't even imagine what the point of that would be. But perhaps I'm just not seeing the forest for the trees, as they say.
qrobit•11mo ago
As a rule of thumb I always make paths absolute when handling files in scripts. But then sometimes I need to copy a directory tree relative to $CWD somewhere else, so I convert them back to relative

Fish, being a great shell, provides this via `path` command[0]

[0]: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/path.html

jl6•11mo ago
> for the primary purpose of helping other programs know where to find stuff

Potential footgun to make a program rely on this to locate, say, a shared library (as in one of the examples), if there’s a possibility that someone has smuggled a malware’d version of it into, say, /tmp, since it defaults to searching the root directory.

spyrja•11mo ago
Kind of, but also kind of not. I mean if someone can smuggle a file into some random directory, chances are they have enough access to write directly to the "correct" folder to begin with. Personally I wouldn't execute or otherwise load any sort of executable content from a non-root directory (although certainly there are many people who wouldn't even think twice before doing such a thing). So it really just boils down to having a sane security-policy. Restrict searches with something like "path -d /usr *" and you are guaranteed not to scoop-up something that was world-writable in the first place. In fact in the example given in the README, that is precisely how that would have worked. Both /lib32 and /lib64 are owned by "root" and hence not a concern.
jl6•11mo ago
Naturally every footgun is guaranteed to be safe as long as you use it right :)

I wonder if a safer default would be to start searches at the current directory rather than the root directory?

spyrja•11mo ago
I did actually consider that at one point, but eventually decided against it because I felt would have meant a sacrifice in performance; first you'd do the local search, then start at the very top and recurse back down, checking every single entry against the local path to be sure that you don't do the local traversal all over again. Fortunately the code base is very clean and straight-forward, so it would be a fairly trivial excercise to just fork the repo and make those changes yourself to get that kind of behaviour.
spyrja•11mo ago
Well I ran a bunch of tests and it turns out that the performance wasn't actually impacted very much after all. So the changes are official. I also made some other adjustments to the default behaviour; if no pattern is specified then it just matches everything. In other words, "path -f" prints every regular file in the filesystem (starting in the current one). Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, otherwise I may not gone down that (decidedly satisfying) rabbit-hole!
account-5•11mo ago
I've been finding nushell's `ls` with a where clause is pretty good for this. There's also the `find` command too.

Google releases Gemma 4 open models

https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/
1012•jeffmcjunkin•7h ago•314 comments

Tailscale's new macOS home

https://tailscale.com/blog/macos-notch-escape
264•tosh•5h ago•129 comments

Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artemis-iis-toilet-is-a-moon-mission-milestone/
94•1659447091•20h ago•29 comments

Cursor 3

https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3
248•adamfeldman•5h ago•210 comments

Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
180•axelriet•7h ago•45 comments

Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

https://blog.danieldavies.com/2004/05/d-squared-digest-one-minute-mba.html
121•sedev•6h ago•55 comments

Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6
400•pretext•9h ago•139 comments

George Goble has died

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/wlfi/name/george-goble-obituary?id=61144779
92•finaard•5h ago•18 comments

ParadeDB (YC S23) Is Hiring Database Internal Engineers (Rust)

https://paradedb.notion.site/
1•philippemnoel•1h ago

The Australian government has announced gambling advertising reforms

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62492e925lo
67•gostsamo•5h ago•45 comments

Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

https://lemonade-server.ai
414•AbuAssar•12h ago•94 comments

LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

https://browsergate.eu/
1516•digitalWestie•10h ago•672 comments

JSON Canvas Spec (2024)

https://jsoncanvas.org/spec/1.0/
79•tobr•3d ago•28 comments

Prefer do notation over Applicative operators when assembling records (2024)

https://haskellforall.com/2024/05/prefer-do-notation-over-applicative
13•wazHFsRy•2d ago•0 comments

Significant progress made on Xbox 360 recompilation

https://readonlymemo.com/rexglue-xbox-360-recompilation-interview/
51•tetrisgm•4d ago•15 comments

Memo: A language that remembers only the last 12 lines of code

https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs/Memo/
7•notem•1h ago•0 comments

OpenAI Acquires TBPN

https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-tbpn/
128•surprisetalk•6h ago•113 comments

Significant raise of reports

https://lwn.net/Articles/1065620/
269•stratos123•14h ago•143 comments

Queueing Requests Queues Your Capacity Problems, Too

https://pushtoprod.substack.com/p/queueing-requests-queues-your-capacity-problems-too
6•mhawthorne•3d ago•1 comments

Inside Nepal's Fake Rescue Racket

https://kathmandupost.com/money/2026/03/27/inside-nepal-s-fake-rescue-racket
242•lode•11h ago•112 comments

Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/04/artemis-moon-launch-trump/686661/
27•paulpauper•1h ago•24 comments

Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why

https://bsky.app/profile/nikigrayson.com/post/3miik2wzosk25
279•mooreds•8h ago•213 comments

IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-04-02-ibm-announces-strategic-collaboration-with-arm-to-shape-the-f...
259•bonzini•14h ago•167 comments

Foxing aspires to be an eBPF-powered replication engine for Linux filesystems

https://codeberg.org/aenertia/foxing
30•tanelpoder•3d ago•4 comments

Magic the Gathering Deck Shuffler

https://mtg.jessitron.honeydemo.io/
28•mooreds•3d ago•15 comments

'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/backrooms-and-the-rise-of-the-institutional-gothic/
160•anarbadalov•10h ago•72 comments

Show HN: A P2P messenger with dual network modes (Fast and Tor)

https://github.com/Realman78/Kiyeovo/
26•Realman78•8h ago•11 comments

Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

https://undark.org/2026/04/01/sweden-schools-books/
714•novaRom•12h ago•375 comments

Amazon is adding a fuel surcharge to fees it collects from third-party sellers

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/02/amazon-add-3point5percent-fuel-and-logistics-surcharge-for-seller...
123•lehi•4h ago•70 comments

Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/artemis-ii-will-use-laser-beams-to-live-stream-4k-moon-fo...
311•speckx•8h ago•137 comments