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!

GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis

https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/glm-5-2-is-the-new-leading-open-weights-model-on-the-artif...
268•himata4113•3h ago•120 comments

RFC 10008: The new HTTP Query Method

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc10008/
62•schappim•1h ago•29 comments

Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

https://wpvip.com/future-of-the-web-2026/
86•thm•36m ago•42 comments

Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata

https://cells2pixels.github.io/
91•esychology•3h ago•12 comments

GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36469-grapheneos-has-been-ported-to-android-17-and-official-rele...
856•Cider9986•16h ago•436 comments

Running local models is good now

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/06/15/running-local-models-is-good-now/
1394•jfb•22h ago•540 comments

Hacker News but for Independent Blogs

https://bubbles.town/
192•headalgorithm•4h ago•66 comments

Show HN: Capacitor Alarm Clock

https://github.com/ArcaEge/capacitor-alarm-clock
49•arcaege•3d ago•17 comments

Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields

https://airfields-freeman.com/
19•wizardforhire•2d ago•2 comments

Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time

https://mll.sh/humiliating-iis-servers-for-fun-and-jail-time/
298•denysvitali•13h ago•70 comments

Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite

https://blog.greg.technology/2026/06/12/map-clustering-is-not-my-favorite.html
42•gregsadetsky•4d ago•14 comments

TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP

https://mareksuppa.com/til/bash-dev-tcp-http-without-curl/
462•mrshu•20h ago•206 comments

Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/11/arbuscular-mycorrhizal-fungi-plant-life-climate-g...
99•tosh•5d ago•21 comments

Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/calvin-and-hobbes-and-the-price-of
469•pseudolus•21h ago•199 comments

GLM 5.2 Performance Benchmarks

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2
38•theanonymousone•5h ago•10 comments

Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?

https://tim.blog/2026/06/12/has-ai-already-killed-nonfiction/
333•imakwana•19h ago•389 comments

Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/06/launching-version-15-of-wolfram-language-mathematica-...
180•alok-g•13h ago•96 comments

The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

https://claude.com/blog/the-founders-playbook
116•e2e4•5h ago•110 comments

GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

https://www.tno.nl/en/digital/artificial-intelligence/gpt-nl/
225•root-parent•18h ago•240 comments

Image Compression

https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/image-compression
5•vinhnx•3d ago•1 comments

Stop Using JWTs

https://gist.github.com/samsch/0d1f3d3b4745d778f78b230cf6061452
426•dzonga•19h ago•254 comments

Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves NP-Complete Problems

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14806
42•ascarshen•9h ago•17 comments

SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/spacex-buy-anysphere-60-billion-2026-06-16/
1054•itsmarcelg•1d ago•1561 comments

From Chesterton's fence to Chesterton's gap

https://stephantul.github.io/blog/unfence/
21•stephantul•5h ago•20 comments

But yak shaving is fun (2019)

https://parksb.github.io/en/article/32.html
274•parksb•22h ago•83 comments

Making 'food out of thin air' (2024)

https://www.noemamag.com/making-food-out-of-thin-air/
30•muchweight•2d ago•6 comments

U.S. Science Is in Chaos

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/americas-compact-between-science-and-politics-is-broken/
166•presspot•2h ago•159 comments

A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time (2022)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/a-brief-tour-of-the-pdp-11-the-most-influential-minicompu...
92•jensgk•2d ago•36 comments

Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/stop-killing-games-fails-to-secure-eu-law-despite-1-3m-signatures-...
298•slymax•11h ago•223 comments

10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module

https://www.gilesthomas.com/2026/06/10g-ethernet-switching-to-broadcom-sfp-plus
166•gpjt•18h ago•146 comments