In Emacs, you can find, create, view, save, and otherwise work with files and file directories. This chapter describes most of the file-related functions of Emacs Lisp, but a few others are described in section Buffers, and those related to backups and auto-saving are described in section Backups and Auto-Saving.
Many of the file functions take one or more arguments that are file
names. A file name is actually a string. Most of these functions
expand file name arguments by calling expand-file-name, so that
`~' is handled correctly, as are relative file names (including
`../'). These functions don't recognize environment variable
substitutions such as `$HOME'. See section Functions that Expand Filenames.
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