Files are generally referred to by their names, in Emacs as elsewhere. File names in Emacs are represented as strings. The functions that operate on a file all expect a file name argument.
In addition to operating on files themselves, Emacs Lisp programs often need to operate on file names; i.e., to take them apart and to use part of a name to construct related file names. This section describes how to manipulate file names.
The functions in this section do not actually access files, so they can operate on file names that do not refer to an existing file or directory.
On VMS, all these functions understand both VMS file-name syntax and Unix syntax. This is so that all the standard Lisp libraries can specify file names in Unix syntax and work properly on VMS without change. On MS-DOS and MS-Windows, these functions understand MS-DOS or MS-Windows file-name syntax as well as Unix syntax.
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.