frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Path is a utility for working with paths

https://gitlab.com/SpyrjaGaldr/path
60•spyrja•1y 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•1y ago
What can this do that standard Unix find can not do?
autobodie•1y ago
cross platform support, according to the description.
indemnity•1y ago
fd exists https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
spyrja•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y ago
“A more ergonomic find command” is a nice elevator pitch.
pimlottc•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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.
account-5•1y ago
I've been finding nushell's `ls` with a where clause is pretty good for this. There's also the `find` command too.
spyrja•1y 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!

Claude: System Prompts

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts
328•tosh•5h ago•144 comments

The AI Credit Resale Economy

https://vectoral.com/blog/who-are-the-token-brokers
121•mlenhard•3h ago•48 comments

NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-ending-key-grant-budding-clinical-researchers
33•brandonb•1h ago•6 comments

St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core

https://www.wptv.com/news/treasure-coast/region-st-lucie-county/saint-lucie-nuclear-power-plant-u...
71•toomuchtodo•2h ago•38 comments

Anton Chekhov played at love most of his life

https://commonreader.wustl.edu/winning-and-losing-at-the-great-game-of-intimacy/
18•lermontov•1d ago•1 comments

GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/gps-and-the-lost-art-of-getting-lost
29•karakoram•2h ago•16 comments

Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga

https://nnamgreb.de/blog/Clamiga+-+Common+Lisp+for+the+Amiga
34•emptybits•3d ago•2 comments

Archie G. Norcross' Maine Forest Fire Maps (1918–22)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/maine-forest-fire-maps/
11•samclemens•3d ago•2 comments

Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-ads-firefox-ios
294•pentagrama•4h ago•118 comments

A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better"

https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/
6•Narishma•48m ago•3 comments

Before Rightmove, there was the Cosmorama

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/before-rightmove-there-was-the-cosmorama-londons-forgotten-p...
8•brod_ie•5d ago•1 comments

The weekend is 100 years old

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/aug/16/the-weekend-is-100-years-old-skiveday-fridays-and-h...
74•lentil_soup•2h ago•41 comments

A True Telnet BBS on a Casio Calculator

https://ei3lh.eu/2026/08/16/a-true-telnet-bbs-on-a-casio-calculator/
52•austinallegro•5h ago•7 comments

A SAT Attack on Tarski's High School Algebra Problem

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08421
58•matt_d•4d ago•19 comments

Tasklet (YC P26) Is Hiring a Head of Design Engineering

https://tasklet.ai/careers/head-of-design-engineering
1•mayop100•4h ago

Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kidney+disappointment%22
244•Alifatisk•5h ago•96 comments

Plastic mechanical computer from 1963: The Digi-Comp 1 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y8bGBE71yw
5•tobr•21h ago•0 comments

Chestnut – eGPU dock with open-source firmware

https://hwbusters.com/news/comma-ai-egpu-dock-runs-open-source-firmware-249-bare-799-with-an-rx-9...
105•txrx0000•2d ago•25 comments

Asus Bike Booster

https://www.asus.com/accessories/bike-booster/asus-oxiis/oxiis-intelligent-bike-booster/
559•wiradikusuma•4d ago•389 comments

Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?

https://brandur.org/fragments/postgres-without-pgbouncer
104•abelanger•3d ago•65 comments

Superconducting monolayer cuprate with a single CuO2 plane

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10857-1
50•sbulaev•3d ago•13 comments

Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work

https://duckdb.org/2026/07/31/asynchronous-io
246•pdet•6d ago•27 comments

Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users

https://wildstatic.com/
39•adjohu•4h ago•28 comments

AI Coding Without the Vibes

https://peterbloem.nl/blog/craft-coding
40•riskone•7h ago•16 comments

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas
241•felixbraun•20h ago•58 comments

Ordinary WiFi can now identify you with near-perfect accuracy

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260811052857.htm
12•jonbaer•39m ago•6 comments

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

https://rhonabwy.com/2026/08/15/software-engineering-fundamentals-matter-more-than-ever/
268•ingve•19h ago•175 comments

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/super-el-nino-growth-accelerating-to-record-strength-f...
377•dgellow•22h ago•262 comments

Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns (2018)

https://tinkerings.org/2018/03/28/guiding-ships-with-moire-patterns/
101•Eridanus2•16h ago•24 comments

Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dad2.70432
463•randycupertino•1d ago•364 comments